Maharashtra tops the honors again

In the past decade, the fortunes of many Indian states have changed. Bihar seems to slowly turning a corner, Karnataka is successfully managing the contrasting twains of development(growing) and corruption (escalating), and Himachal Pradesh, if the India Today magazine’s annual surveys are to be believed, is a leading state in India. However, nothing can match the tragic decline this decade brought for Maharashtra, once (up to 1990s)  believed to be the foremost state in India. Between 2000-2010, Maharashtra had the misfortune of being led by one mediocre government after the other, cultural terrorists like the MNS and Shiv Sena destroyed whatever little remaining liberal credentials Mumbai had, and state’s image was battered by scam after scam. Mumbai, Maharashtra’s capital and once India’s foremost city, lost that honor to New Delhi: New Delhi today can reasonably claim to be India’s financial capital, and the country’s most attractive city. 2000-2010 was thus the lost decade for Maharashtra – perhaps the first of many more to come.

However, there is one list that Maharashtra has managed to top:  farmer suicides.

For the tenth year in succession, Maharashtra remains the worst state for farmer suicide. In a hard-hitting article, P Sainath, The Hindu’s rural affairs editor, says:

"The NCRB figure for Maharashtra as a whole in 2009 is 2,872 farmers' suicides. So it remains the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth year running. The ‘decline' of 930 that this figure represents would be joyous if true. But no State has worked harder to falsify reality. For 13 years, the State has seen a nearly unrelenting rise. Suddenly, there's a drop of 436 and 930 in 2008 and 2009. How? For almost four years now, committees have functioned in Vidarbha's crisis districts to dismiss most suicides as ‘non-genuine.' What is truly frightening is the Maharashtra government's notion that fixing the numbers fixes the problem."

The article is a must read: it shows how, in the past fifteen  years, close to quarter million Indian farmers have committed suicide. Mr. Sainath terms this ‘the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country’. Apart from a few loan waivers thrown in – coinciding with the general elections, obviously – and appointment of a few committees, the national government’s response has been lukewarm. The Maharashtra government, as expected, tirelessly worked to protect the interests of the loan sharks, as this example would show.

PS: unsurprisingly, the suicides have peaked since 2004, the same year Sharad Pawar – hailing from Maharashtra - took over as India’s agriculture minister. As this blog has repeatedly pointed out, Mr. Pawar’s tenure has been disastrous - with his criminal neglect of his portfolio, and his inability/incompetence to create a vision for Indian agriculture, Mr. Pawar has failed us all. With so much blood on his hands, Mr. Pawar has much to answer for, but India’s flawed democracy ensures that Mr. Pawar can rest at peace, and worry about topics closer to his heart, such as Lavasa.