To: Dr APK
Abdul Kalam, President of India
Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi
Subject: Rural
suicides in Punjab
Dear Dr Kalam,
We have frequently
written to you as well as your predecessors to call attention to the urgent
needs of Punjab’s farmers. Rural suicides are the most drastic symptom of
Punjab’s deepening agrarian crisis. It is regrettable that despite the
magnitude of this problem neither the Central Government nor the state
government is willing to acknowledge the problem or take corrective
measures. Rather the government is deliberately concealing the problem.
Punjab ceased being a disturbed area more than a decade ago and there can
be no reason for underplaying economic distress and rural suicides.
To date, no entire
district – meaning all villages in a single district – has been surveyed
comprehensively even for one single year. It has not been done even for an
entire subdivision. To our knowledge, the MASR survey of Moonak Subdivision
of district Sangrur is the most complete – it covers all 93 villages in the
subdivision – it’s timeframe is 16 years (1988 to 2006) and it includes
data not only on the name of the victim but also means of committing
suicide, age, landholding, quantum of debt. This census is supported by
panchayat affidavits for each case, a methodology accepted by the National
Farmers Commission and recommended to the states.
Even in the Moonak
survey, in which every effort was made to document all cases, MASR accepts
that some cases might have escaped attention. The late Aman Sidhu who
carried out the Moonak subdivision survey, covered all 93 villages and
collected 1422 cases – 1279 of which are verified with panchayat
affidavits. Many more cases are in process of documentation. Perhaps a
hundred odd cases may be unreported. In January and February of 2007,
another eight men committed suicide in Moonak Subdivision. These are cases
that came to our knowledge incidentally; there may be more.
At its programme in
Bathinda on September 7, the BKU (Ekta) released the following suicide data
(random sample) that it collected using the MASR format.
