Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar have proudly said on number of occasions that India is all set to achieve double-digit growth in coming days. You can ask why I am putting Sharad Pawar’s name in the series of PM and FM here in the report.

The reason behind is the poor growth of agriculture in the country and despite the poor show Agriculture minister himself is rallying with other two colleagues. I am research scholar doing Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) on topic – “Is India really developing without Agriculture”. I am very much thankful to my guide for assigning me this topic that gave me the chance to know the real picture of Indian agriculture.

During my visit to Maharashtra to know basic cause of thousands of farmers’ suicide, I was stunned to see apathetic conditions of farmers’ families in several villages in the region. I would blame media for hardly putting their plight in their perspective. The children of farmers had committed suicide because of inabilities of their parents to fight with poverty and debts. Some of the farmers had even protested with slogans in their hands - “Every farmer counts. Every child dreams.”

Indian government and state governments have no time even to think about these poor farmers and they are busy counting the shopping malls in cities to show the growth and setting up Special Economic Zones on land acquired forcefully from poor farmers.

When I heard a painful story of 16-year-old Dharmendra in a village how his father consumed pesticide and his mother burnt herself to death rather facing the ignominy of having the artiya (moneylender) on her doorstep every week. My heart bled when Dharmendra, who still owes Rs4 to 5 hundred thousand to the local moneylender, was telling his story with tears in his eyes.

It was just one example and you can find countless number of such examples in almost every village in Vidarbha region. One suicide in every eight hours – official data tells the real story. It is refreshing departure from the statements made by senior ministers in the Union Cabinet.

In India, more than 80 crore people are still spending an average of Rs20 per day on livelihood. Rural India is crying for attention but no one in the government has time to listen. The growth rate in farming sector is just 3.8 per cent in last financial year. Agriculture is likely to grow at mere 2.6 per cent in 2007-08, and the industry and services sectors are projected to grow at 8.6 and 10.6 per cent, respectively. Isn’t it a real picture of agriculture in India?

Data says that 17,000 farmers committed suicide in the year 2006 and 4,500 committed suicide in Maharashtra alone. In the month of January 2008, 74 suicides have been reported in Vidarbha. For these farmers, to plough is no longer lucrative, migration to other cities is too costly, and they find only one way to get rid of moneylenders’ threat – SUICIDE.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) report entitled, ‘Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, 2006’, 4,453 farmers, over a quarter of the all-India total of 17,060, committed suicide in 2006 in the state of Maharashtra. It was said to be the worst figure recorded in any year for any state since the NCRB first started recording farmers’ suicides in Indian states. The most shocking part of the story is that it happened in the same year when both the Prime Minister and chief minister had announced the relief packages worth 4,825 crores for farmers of Vidarbha.

Let me give you the most horrible data of the century collected from rural parts of India – more than 1,50,000 farmers committed suicide between the year 1997 and 2005 and two-thirds of the total count were from just four ‘developed’ states – ‘Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh’. An eminent journalist P Sainath, the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature and creative communications arts has named these states as the ‘Suicide SEZ’ or ‘Special Elimination Zone’ for farmers.

One of the ‘prosperous’ states Punjab was once intended to be the paragon of the Green Revolution success story but now farmers in the state have committed suicide by jumping in front of trains, setting themselves on fire, or poisoning themselves. The nutrients of the land are being degraded because of the over-use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to grow the genetically modified seeds successfully. Farmers do think that chemicals ensure a higher output but it only leads to further devastation of the land.

This is the real irony of India farmers that when the BSE SENSEX goes down, the Finance Minister and Prime Minister themselves promptly give assurance to investors by saying the government will take care of their financial interest in stock market. But when farmers commit suicide in large numbers due to indebtedness, forget the PM and FM, even the Agriculture Minister doesn’t bother to say a single line of assurance for the farmers’ families. This is real shame of new modern and developing India.