ABSTRACT
In this part, the suicide trends among the farmers are analysed vis-à-vis an agricultural development outlook before the National Policy for Farmers 2007, which was launched to tackle the onslaught of farmers’ suicides in 1995. They are also analysed by taking into account earlier developmental outcomes from recommendations made by the National Commission on Agriculture 1976, which had given a developmental plan for twenty-five years, ending in 2000. This part of the book discusses the pre-2007 period, starting when farmers’ suicides began to appear, around 1995. It looks into specifically whether these suicides were mainly because of failures in the development plan and the implementation of recommendations of the National Commission on Agriculture 1976 or because of failures of the same due to a shift in development priority away from agriculture due to excessively channelling resources to other sectors leading to a decline in the stress on agricultural farm-input schemes, extension services and lower investments into irrigation. Similarly, in the post-2007 scenario, this part of the book examines whether the National Policy for Farmers 2007 could arrest the agrarian crisis by changing ground conditions and the number of farmers dying by suicide, in terms of farmers’ income between 2003 and 2013 according to the Situation Assessment Surveys of NSSO.
