5. Any person faced with serious difficulties tries his level best to come out of that; he does not immediately think of suicide. When he sees some others around him ending their lives in desperation he gets tempted to follow in those footsteps. That is why generally a sole farmer in a village does not commit suicide. There are some others around him who also do likewise. Suicides are also like an infectious disease. At the moment farmers in Vidarbha appear to be suffering from this epidemic. 6. Negative subsidy is a common feature in all types of crops in India but it was and still is most crippling with cotton. The plight of the cotton farmer in Maharashtra became so tragic mainly because of the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme which paid him far less than his counterparts from neighbouring States like Andhra, Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat. This forced the farmer to take loan which he could never repay. This continued to happen year after year for forty years and during this period the farmers bled profusely. A farmer is not driven to suicide just because crop failed in a year because of deficient rainfall or some such calamity. He is used to such things. The present wave of suicides you see in Vidarbha is primarily caused by the Monopoly Scheme which wounded the farmers grievously. That wound kept festering year after year resulting in a gangrene which you see today. If one has to search for just one villain for the farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha, then one has to point his finger at this Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme. Joshi had also suggested some remedies for this situation. Roughly they were as follows: 1. All existing loans of the farmers are illegal and immoral. They have remained unpaid mainly because he has been deliberately denied the right price for his produce. To attach his land, implements or animals for non-payment is wrong 170
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
