ABSTRACT
The genesis of the agrarian crisis culminating in farmers’ suicides by the year 1995 and currently continuing unabated is analysed in this chapter from the angle of wider Indian polities. It discusses how our parliamentary democracy and the mixed economy work and how it ends up with a process-heavy insensitive developmental model with the least control over the outcome and lacks energy and intention for innovative solutions. It establishes the fact that in such a scenario, even the latest initiative of the National Policy for Farmers 2007 based on the Swaminathan Commission ended up as another dose of the old potion in a new package. The chapter’s analysis also establishes that farmers have been left destined to the life of infertile labour like the Greek god Sisyphus’s punishment of rolling a rock from the bottom of a mountain to its peak only to see it roll down from there, making him repeat this ordeal for eternity.
