HAMIRGARH (India): Unlike his father and brother who hanged themselves, Labh Singh gulped down pesticide to end his misery, leaving his wife to look after five children and pay off the family debts.

His widow Saroj was at her parents’ home and by the time she heard the news last November, Singh had already been cremated.

“There was never enough to eat in the house, so the debt kept piling up,” Saroj said at her home in Hamirgarh village in the Punjab, a region long known as India’s breadbasket.

Singh joined the thousands of farmers and labourers who have killed themselves in the affluent state in the past decade because of a crisis blamed on official neglect of the farming sector.

Experts say the government must pay immediate attention to agriculture if it is to save the situation, even as the price of the food grown by the farmers surges rapidly.

While suicides in India’s other states have been extensively recorded and acknowledged by the federal government, alarming numbers in Punjab have drawn far less attention.

“The government refuses to admit there’s a crisis here as Punjab has always been the showpiece agricultural success story,” said Inderjit Singh Jaijee, a former legislator who works on farmer suicides.

As the majority of suicides are recorded with police as natural deaths because of fear of harassment, there is little official data on the Punjab cases.

Jaijee’s non-profit Movement Against State Repression estimates that more than 60,000 debt-ridden Punjab farmers have killed themselves in the past two decades.

More conservative estimates put the number at 20,000 since the mid-1990s.

“Today, the farmers are killing themselves. Tommorrow, they will kill others if something is not done,” Jaijee warned.

Punjab farmers labour under a collective debt of Rs100 billion ($2.5 billion) — three times the average for farmers in the rest of India, according to the non-profit Agricultural Heritage Mission.

Rising pesticide and fertiliser costs, shrinking land holdings, declining soil fertility and heavily-subsidised farming in rich countries are some of the factors blamed for the tragedy.

In the past five years, 400,000 Punjab farmers have become labourers after selling their land to pay debts, said farmer Ram Daya Singh, who collects information on the suicides.

Village money-lenders, who charge up to 25 per cent interest in the absence of institutional finance, shrug off any blame.

“If a farmer earns Rs10 and spends Rs20 on his daughter’s wedding, what option do you think he will have but to kill himself,” said money-lender Sarmukh Singh at the local grain market, where tonnes of wheat arrived as harvest ended.

COST OF ‘GREEN REVOLUTION’: Ironically, Punjab was one of the states that spearheaded India’s “Green Revolution” in the 1960s which led to a four-fold increase in staple food production.

It was hailed as one of the world’s most successful agricultural stories as high-yield varieties of wheat and rice were introduced, chemical fertilisers and pesticides promoted and irrigation intensified.

Though it brought food security and decades of prosperity to Punjab, many of those decisions are today blamed for the dismal state of agriculture.

Farmers were urged to grow paddy which is not natural to the northern region and requires intensive irrigation, said activist Jaijee.

“The state has more than one million tubewells. At this rate, Punjab will become a desert in a few years,” he said.

Indeed, Punjab’s water table has fallen rapidly, leading to rising costs amid the need to dig ever deeper wells and increased contamination of ground water caused by rampant use of pesticides.

“We don’t need agriculture with greed. We don’t need technology which is not ecologically, economically and socially justifiable to our surroundings,” said activist Umendra Dutt, who promotes natural farming at the Heritage Mission.

“The Green Revolution was based on hybrid seeds, chemicals, machines and water-guzzling crop systems,” said Dutt.

Punjab, which has 1.5 per cent of the country’s total area and 2.5 per cent of the agricultural land, consumes 18 per cent of total pesticides used in India.

It also uses the highest percentage of chemical fertilisers and has the highest rate of ground water exploitation.

All this leads to far higher costs amid declining productivity, in turn leading to increasing losses and heavy borrowing by farmers.

Paradoxically, to preserve Punjab as India’s wheat basket, the government did not promote industry, resulting in little alternative employment.

“In the 1950s, the government kept Punjab as the granary of India, and deprived it of industry,” Jaijee said.

HEADING TOWARDS FAMINE: This year, the federal government has predicted a record wheat harvest of 76.78 million tonnes — up five per cent — and ruled out wheat imports after buying from abroad for two years.

The government has also raised to Rs1,000 ($25) a quintal (100 kg), from Rs750 last season, the minimum price at which it buys wheat from farmers for distribution to the poor.

But some experts said that if the government is to avert a famine, it must change many policies which they say benefit seed, fertiliser and grain trading corporations at the cost of farmers.

“The rate of growth of food output in the 1980s was 3.8 per cent per year.

It has come down to 0.5 percent per year in the past six years,” said S.P

Shukla, a former member of India’s Planning Commission.

The farm sector — which supports nearly two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people — grew at 3.2 per cent in the quarter ended March 2008, while the economy expanded by 8.4 per cent.

“The large-scale diversion of fertile land to special economic zones (for industry) has to stop or we will have a massive famine in two years,” said food expert Vandana Shiva, founder of the non-profit Navdanya (nine seeds) based in New Delhi.She said many pro-market policies — boosting export-oriented cash crops, promoting bio-fuel production and importing grain at high prices — were pushing farmers to the brink.

With an eye on next year’s general elections, the government in March announced a massive $15-billion bailout for 40 million poor farmers.

But farmers say it will help only those who borrowed from banks, rather than moneylenders.

“That loan waiver is a big lie. This economy is booming only for city people,” said Ram Diya Singh.

“This debt has destroyed us,” said Baljit Kaur, whose widowed sister abandoned her three young children to marry another man after her farmer husband killed himself.—AFP