Financial woes push up India’s suicide rate

In a country where as many as one in three of the world’s suicides occur, about 12 farmers kill themselves every day in Maharashtra, the second-largest state amid rising debt from falling cotton prices.

Shobha Singh Bais poses for photograph as she holds her husband's photograph works outside her house in Yavatmal, India, on Tuesday Feb. 3, 2015. Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

Mumbai // Shobha Singh Bais waited for her husband Govind to finish his dinner of vegetables and flatbread before eating her own, as is the custom in their village of Hivar and many others in India.

When Govind was done, the 55-year-old cotton farmer calmly told his wife that he had eaten rat poison. Shobha ran outside, calling for her 30-year-old son, Chandan, who has a tobacco stall nearby. When the two returned, Govind was frothing at the mouth. He died last month on an auto rickshaw as it sped to a hospital 12 kilometres away.

In a country where as many as one in three of the world’s suicides occur, about 12 farmers a day kill themselves in Maharashtra, the second-largest state, and the numbers are growing, farmer lobby group data show. A global cotton surplus has sent prices tumbling and aggravated rural poverty in India. Govind was two years in arrears on bank loans, had to replant his crop last year because of late rains and was facing the 100,000 rupee (Dh6,000) cost of marrying off one of his sons.

“My husband was very tense in the last few days before his death,” Shobha, 47, said as she sat on the mud floor outside her house and cleaned wheat for an evening meal.

Although Indian farmers routinely face financial hardship, the lowest domestic cotton prices in three years and higher costs for labour and pesticide will probably make things worse in 2015, said Kishor Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, the farmers’ lobby.

A rising number of growers are unable to repay loans. Many don’t have enough land to offer as collateral and must borrow from money lenders who charge five to six times the bank rate.

According to Samiti, farmer suicides totalled 4,200 last year in Maharashtra, a western state which is the biggest cotton grower after Gujarat and every year has the most such deaths in India. If the government confirms the number, it would be the highest since 2007.

The Bais family’s loan totalled 270,000 rupees with repayments due twice a year over five years. Officials from the bank often visited after the family defaulted. “We have to get enough to buy us our daily meals,” Shobha said. “How can we save anything to pay the loan?”

For cotton growers, the outlook is bleak. Global reserves are set to more than double to a record 109 million bales in four years, in part because China, the biggest buyer, is taking less, US Department of Agriculture data show. Last month, cotton traded at its lowest price in five years on international markets. The government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who swept to power in May on a promise of making sure that all crop prices remained 50 per cent above the cost of production, has done little to ease farmers’ woes, Mr Tiwari said.

Agriculture is a matter for individual states and the federal government helps only with policy and budgetary support, Mohan Kundaria, junior farm minister, told the nation’s parliament in December.

“Extreme variations in prices with no support system is what hit the farmers,” said K Nagaraj, a professor at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai who conducted a study on farm suicides in 2008 for the Madras Institute of Development Studies. “When prices are good,” farmers plant cotton, he said. “When the prices are bad, they don’t know what to do.”

India’s cotton exports may drop as much as 58 per cent this year, even as the harvest climbs to a near record of 40 million bales, the Cotton Association of India estimates.

Supplies from India are less in demand because they cost more than cotton from producers including the US and Brazil, because of government price support, said Shirish Shah, a partner at Bhaidas Cursondas, a Mumbai-based exporter. Indian cotton costs 2 cents a pound more than international rates.

“If we lower our prices, we can export, but then we don’t make money,” Mr Shah said.

For Chandan and his uncles, who grow cotton on a nine-acre farm, the cost of cultivation last year was about 150,000 rupees. The field produced about 800 kilograms of cotton, which was divided between him, his two uncles, and a married aunt. At minimum price-support levels, they will earn from 30,000 rupees to 32,400 rupees to be divided equally, meaning they will lose about 120,000 rupees.

“The minute our creditors know we’ve sold the crop, they’ll line up at the door to get their dues,” Chandan said. “What are we to do? Pay the creditors or feed ourselves?”

*Bloomberg