Hiding the corpses? Why farmer suicide figures in the country are highly suspect

Hiding the corpses? Why farmer suicide figures in the country are highly suspect
Renowned journalist and activist P Sainath. File photo

There is a reason why the official figures of farmer suicides in the country have become highly unreliable.

“In 2016, the NDA government had asked the National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB) to stop publishing farmer suicide figures. Since then, the NCRB has not put out the death toll of farmers in any of the states in the country,” said journalist P Sainath, a Ramon Magsaysay award recipient and the founder editor of People's Archive of Rural India. He was delivering the Saratchandran Memorial Lecture at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala in the capital.

“In 2017, the NCRB was shut down and merged with the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD),” he said.

Sainath said the NCRB was first undermined by the UPA government. “When Sharad Pawar was agriculture minister, he had presided over the largest number of farmer suicides anywhere in the world,” Sainath said. “In 2013, when the suicide numbers turned obscene, they reformatted the questionnaire that field officers ask to collect data, and also the very methodology of data collection,” he said.

“What the UPA did, the NDA did on steroids,” Sainath said. Essentially, they found a way to hide the corpses. “They put the dead in newer categories. Thus came into being the 'others' column,” Sainath said.

Result: Farmers' suicides fell by 50 per cent in 2015. “Of course, the other category shot up by 128 per cent. In Karnataka when farmer suicides were shown to have fallen dramatically, the deaths in the 'others' category rose 245 per cent,” Sainath said.

It were such embarrassing figures that eventually prompted the NDA government to shut down the NCRB and merge it with the BPRD. “But the BPRD had no expertise in collecting such data. They are basically a research wing and was good only at putting out scientific reports. Asking the BPRD to do the NCRB's job was like asking the voters to stay at home and allowing opinion pollsters to decide the fate of India's democracy,” Sainath said.

The crime records bureau provided a wealth of information. “Every year, all police stations in a district compile a list of crimes within their jurisdiction and pass it on to the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB). All SCRBs then compile all the district-level information and submit it to the NCRB. The NCRB then puts out two sets of data. Crime in India is one. The other is accident deaths and suicides in India (ADSI).

Finding that they did not have any crime figures at their command, Sainath said that the NCRB was revived 10 months after it was shut down. By then it is felt that some 40,000-60,000 farmer deaths had taken place. “But the Centre has barred it from publishing suicide figures,” he said.

Sainath is also amused by a figure put out by the Maharashtra government recently. It said 12,021 farmers had committed suicide in Maharahstra in the last four years. “From where did these figures come if the NCRB had stopped collecting data,” he asked.

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