Failing Economy Forcing 70% Of Indian Farmers To Spend More Than They Earn

Nirmal Singh Lotus Green recently wrote an article in which he highlighted how 70% of more than 90 million farming families are spending way more than they actually earn in a month. Debt is one of the primary reasons of more than half of all suicides around the country if the recent studies and research are to be believed.

Since 2012, the number of loans that farmers have taken to invest in their farming lands has come down to half and during the same period, additional loans to meet financial and health issues by the farmers have doubled.

65 million farmers who have land holdings of one hectare are spending more than they earn according to the reports of NSSO. And farmers who own more than 10 hectares of land are maintaining a healthy surplus every month. The condition down south is the worst – states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have the highest debt numbers - 93%, and 82% respectively.

Among the reasons for farmer suicides in India, indebtedness is pretty high – 55% of all suicides are due to indebtedness. More than 300,000 heads of the farming families have committed suicide since 1995 and this number is only rising.

The increase in the healthcare costs makes things worse for the farming families, wrote Nirmal Singh Lotus Green. The income of the farmers is meager, to say the least, and to top that, the healthcare costs are rising every year. From 2002 to 2012, the number of outstanding loans rose from 3% to 6% and during the same time, the loans taken for farm business fell by half – from 58% to 29%.

The rural population, more than half of it, uses private healthcare services that cost them 15% more than what they earn in a month. There are many factors affecting the farm crisis and indebtedness is one of them. Couple it with issues like lack of alternate income, stagnation in agriculture, and institutional vacuum and you get a total loan sum of 3.1 lakh crore that is still unpaid. Waiving such a huge number is not a feasible idea according to NirmalSingh Lotus Green – the sum that needs to be paid is equal to 2.6% of Indian GDP.

The economic policies of the country, especially the ones concerning the farmers, should be reformed if the farming crisis of the country is to be tackled.