Articles, Social - Monday, July 28, 2008 17:12 - 0 Comments

Hope for the Drowning — India’s Farmer Suicide Problem and Amma’s Solutions

It was only after Amma’s program in Vidarbha in Feburary 2008 that some of the Western devotees traveling with Amma learned the full extent of the region’s suicide epidemic. Figures that baffle the mind: farmers committing suicide at a rate as fast as one every eight hours— more than 1,000 suicides a year.

Wanting to clearly understand the problem, one such devotee asked Amma to explain the situation as well as Amma’s plans to help rectify it. “The entire lives of these people revolve around agriculture,” Amma said.

“The government should be supporting them. In some places it is doing so, but not effectively enough. In other places, it is not doing so at all. Some f a r mers own and cultivate very small plots of land—maybe only one to four acres. That is their sole source of income. If there is a problem with their harvest—if their crops fail—they go broke.

Sometimes when the crops are planted, the price may be at 20 or 30 rupees per kilo, but then by harvest time the value has plummeted to only 10 rupees or less. When this happens, they have no other means to continue farming than to take out loans, using their land as collateral. Continue…