Operation Kagar: Colonial capitalism’s death toll marches apace

In 2010, 187,000 Indians killed themselves. This number represents one fifth of all global suicides that year.

In 2014, Cambridge University researchers Jonathan Kennedy and Lawrence King published The political economy of farmers’ suicides in India: indebted cash-crop farmers with marginal landholdings explain state-level variation in suicide rates in the journal Globalisation and Health. Their research found strong causal links between areas with the most suicides and areas where impoverished farmers are trying to grow crops that suffer from wild price fluctuations due to India’s relatively recent shift to free market economics. They saw that farmers with the following characteristics experience tend to experience high suicide risk:

• grow cash crops like coffee and cotton;
• work ‘marginal’ farms of less than one hectare;
• have debts of 300 INR or more.

These characteristics account for almost 75% of the variability in state-level suicides.

Yes, there is a suicide epidemic in marginalised areas of Indian agriculture that are at the mercy of global economics. Hundreds of thousands of male farmers, and in many cases their wives too, take their own lives by drinking the modern pesticides designed to provide them with bountiful harvests. These chemicals cause swift muscle and breathing paralysis to bring about a horrific end.