It is estimated that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. A great number of those affected are cash crop farmers, and cotton farmers in particular. In 2009 alone, the most recent year for which official figures are available, 17,638 farmers committed suicide—that’s one farmer every 30 minutes. While striking on their own, these figures considerably underestimate the actual number of farmer suicides taking place. Women, for example, are often excluded from farmer suicide statistics because most do not have title to land—a common prerequisite for being recognized as a farmer in official statistics and programs.
This report focuses on the human rights of Indian farmers and of the estimated 1.5 million surviving family members who have been affected by the farmer suicide crisis to date. Millions more continue to face the very problems that have driven so many to take their lives. The Report seeks to amplify the many voices calling on the Indian government to act now to put an end to this unmitigated disaster. Farmers in the western state of Maharashtra, for example, now address their suicide notes to the President and Prime Minister, in the hopes that their deaths may force the Indian government to remedy the conditions that have led so many farmers to take their own lives. Rachmandra Raut, who committed suicide in 2010, even went to the trouble of purchasing expensive official stamp paper and—in laying out the reasons for his despair to this official audience—cited two years of successive crop failure and harassment by bank employees attempting to recover his loans.
These farmers and their families are among the victims of India’s longstanding agrarian crisis. Economic reforms and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market over the past two decades have increased costs, while reducing yields and profits for many farmers, to the point of great financial and emotional distress. As a result, smallholder farmers are often trapped in a cycle of debt. During a bad year, money from the sale of the cotton crop might not cover even the initial cost of the inputs, let alone suffice to pay the usurious interest on loans or provide adequate food or necessities for the family. Often the only way out is to take on more loans and buy more inputs, which in turn can lead to even greater debt. Indebtedness is a major and proximate cause of farmer suicides in India. Many farmers, ironically, take their lives by ingesting the very pesticide they went into debt to purchase.
The magnitude of the number of Indian farmers who have committed suicide must not overwhelm the fact that an intensely individual tragedy lies behind each and every one of these deaths. The effects of this tragedy haunt the families of these casualties of India’s agrarian crisis in ways that are impossible to escape—families inherit the debt, children drop out of school to become farmhands, and surviving family members may themselves commit suicide out of sheer desperation. The Indian government’s response to the crisis—largely in the form of limited debt relief and compensation programs—has, by and large, failed to address the magnitude and scope of the problem or its underlying causes.
This report focuses primarily on the human rights of cotton farmers in India. The government has long been alerted to the cotton farmer suicide crisis, yet has done little to adequately respond. Cotton exemplifies India’s general shift toward cash crop cultivation, a shift that has contributed significantly to farmer vulnerability, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of suicides in India are committed by farmers in the cash crop sector. The cotton industry, like other cash crops in India, has also been dominated by foreign multinationals that promote genetically modified seeds and exert increasing control over the cost, quality, and availability of agricultural inputs.
This report and its concluding policy recommendations are based on interviews with actors in India who have been working on agrarian issues related to farmer suicides for extensive periods of time. It also draws on and analyzes official government statistics on farmer suicides and surveys extensive academic literature and media investigations of farmer suicides in India. The report’s analysis of the human rights implications of the crisis—and the Indian government’s attendant human rights obligations—are based on the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s expertise in international human rights law, as well as its longstanding work on human rights in India.
As noted throughout this report, taking the steps necessary to prevent farmer suicides and ensure farmers’ rights is not just a matter of sound policy or basic humanity for the Indian government; it is also a matter of hard legal obligation. India is a State Party to multiple international human rights treaties and has consistently been put on notice by United Nations bodies that the human rights of farmers are at stake. As detailed in this report, a number of human rights are deeply affected by this crisis, including the rights to: life, health, water and food, an adequate standard of living, equality and non-discrimination, and the right to an effective remedy. India is obligated to respect, protect, and fulfill these rights, which includes an obligation to ensure that corporations and other business enterprises are not interfering with the enjoyment of human rights. Businesses must also, as a baseline, respect the human rights of Indian farmers, and should address adverse human rights impacts stemming from their activities.
