Sowing with Suicides: Farmers Feed India
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APRIL 2025
India must talk about the people we often forget — Indian farmers.
Not long ago, many of them were labelled as Khalistanis, Naxalites, Maoists, or "Andolanjeevis" — professional protesters.
These terms weren’t reserved for militants or rebels, but for those whose only act of defiance was to demand fair treatment, minimum support, and dignity.
These are the hands that feed the nation, yet they are dismissed with suspicion, maligned in headlines, and often ignored in policymaking.
India proudly boasts of being the world’s largest producer of pulses and the second-largest of rice and wheat. But behind these numbers is a tragic irony.
The very cultivators of our nation’s bounty live lives mired in uncertainty, debt, and social neglect. Farmers toil under blistering skies and in barren fields, not for prosperity, but for survival.
Their children often skip meals or school, as their parents try to squeeze a living from failing crops and falling prices.
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And when hope runs dry, another farmer takes their own life
Amid televised IPL glitz and billion-dollar cricket deals, their plight rarely gets a prime-time slot. The contradiction is gut-wrenching.
While we celebrate food grain surpluses and rising GDPs, those who enable these achievements are slipping into despair.
Tractors, once symbols of progress, are sold to pay hospital bills. Land and ancestral gold, once a matter of pride, is mortgaged to purchase basic agricultural inputs.
And when hope runs dry, another farmer takes their own life.
According to a report in The Hindu (April 23, 2025), 269 farmers died by suicide in Marathwada between January and March 2025. This marks a significant increase from 204 during the same period in 2024.
Beed district alone recorded 71 suicides, up from 44 last year.
Yet, the state aid has been meagre — only ₹18 lakh disbursed against the ₹295 lakh sought. In Jalna, not a single rupee was distributed despite 13 farmer deaths.
This isn’t a one-off crisis.
Between 1995 and 2018, nearly 400,000 farmers took their lives in India — about 48 per day.
In 2022 alone, 11,290 farming-sector suicides were recorded, accounting for 6.6% of the national suicide total.
Farmers, especially in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, face suicide rates 47% higher than the national average.
It is a crisis that transcends droughts and floods — it is one rooted in apathy, policy failure, and systemic injustice.
The reasons are multifaceted.
Economic distress is chief among them. Farmers are burdened with debt from buying seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides — inputs whose prices have risen sharply over the years.
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Between 1995 and 2018, nearly 400,000 farmers took their lives in India — about 48 per day
Climate change, irregular monsoons, and crop failures worsen their woes.
The introduction of genetically modified seeds has brought its own challenges, including higher costs and dependency on seed corporations.
Access to institutional credit is another major roadblock. With limited reach of formal financial systems, many farmers turn to private moneylenders who charge exorbitant interest rates.
Add to this the problem of land fragmentation, and the scale of economic instability becomes clearer.
Yet, the distress is not only financial.
The social costs of failed harvests and unpaid debts often come with humiliation and hopelessness.
Marriages, festivals, illness — all continue to impose their financial burdens, with no corresponding increase in income.
The inability to fulfil societal roles only deepens the psychological toll.
Government schemes, while ambitious on paper, have fallen short in practice.
PM-KISAN, with its ₹6,000 annual support, reaches 9.8 crore out of India’s 12.3 crore farmers — a significant number, but it still leaves nearly 2.5 crore farmers excluded from its benefits.
PM-KMY, which offers pensions for old age, has seen only 23.38 lakh registrations, amounting to less than 2% of the total farming population — a glaring indicator of its limited reach.
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With limited reach of formal financial systems, many farmers turn to private moneylenders...
PMFBY crop insurance has witnessed some uptake, but slow claim settlements and farmer dissatisfaction have marred its effectiveness.
Schemes like Kisan Credit Card (KCC), PMKSY for irrigation, and Soil Health Cards have had impact in pockets, but inconsistencies in execution and lack of universal access continue to blunt their overall success.
Despite India having 53% of its landmass under cultivation, a feat unmatched globally, its farmers remain among the most distressed.
Marathwada's long history of drought and poor groundwater management is mirrored in Bundelkhand and Vidarbha.
These regions share similar challenges — unpredictable rainfall, soil degradation, and minimal state support.
Adding to this irony is the government's unfulfilled promise to double farmers' incomes by 2022 — a target publicly declared in 2016.
However, multiple studies and reports confirm that real income growth has been marginal at best, with many farmers witnessing stagnation or even decline in earnings due to inflation and rising input costs.
The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data and other independent assessments highlight that average monthly farm income remains dismally low, hovering around ₹10,000, making the ambitious claim more rhetorical than real.
The disconnect between political assurances and ground realities continues to erode farmers' trust in institutions meant to safeguard their welfare.
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The farmer’s crisis is not new.
Journalists like P. Sainath chronicled this decline in the 1990s, bringing national attention to the suicides that neoliberal reforms and global market exposure intensified.
But even before that, in colonial India, oppressive taxation and famines devastated rural livelihoods.
The difference is that today, such tragedies are often dismissed as statistical inevitabilities.
And so, when farmers protest — as they did during the 2020–2021 agitation against the new farm laws — they are branded anti-national. Over 700 farmers died in those protests.
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Adding to this irony is the government's unfulfilled promise to double farmers' incomes by 2022...
The laws were eventually repealed, but only after months of encampments, confrontations, and political stonewalling.
India must ask itself: how long can we ignore the people who grow our food?
How long will their deaths go unnoticed while urban India cheers its cricket teams and scrolls past rural despair? The reality is stark.
We don’t lack food.
We lack compassion.
We don’t lack technology.
We lack political will.
To truly honour the farmer, policy must move beyond token schemes to structural reform.
We must invest in sustainable irrigation, fair pricing, and local procurement systems.
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Over 700 farmers died in those protests
We must strengthen rural education and healthcare, so that farming doesn’t remain a profession of last resort.
We must rewrite the social contract between the Indian state and its farmers.
Until that happens, every grain of rice on our plate should remind us not of abundance, but of absence — the absence of empathy, the absence of justice, and the absence of the man or woman who once grew it.
The farmer continues to live as if in the British Raj.
And the rest of India?
We continue to celebrate cricket and GDP growth, blind to the silent fields where lives are sown, only to be lost.
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