The General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee, former Union Minister, and Lok Sabha MP from Sirsa, Kumari Selja said that the arable land available to farmers in the country is continuously decreasing, while the amount of debt is continuously increasing. Due to increasing debt, more than one farmer on average is forced to commit suicide every hour in the country, yet the central BJP government is not ready to take any steps to address their plight.
In a statement released to the media, Kumari Selja said that this revelation comes from reports presented from time to time in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha and data from the NSO and NCRB. This shows that about 52 percent of the country’s population depends on agriculture for employment, and agriculture contributes 18 percent to the GDP. However, compared to other sectors, the situation of people involved in farming is continuously deteriorating in the country.
The former Union Minister said that every farming family in the country is buried under an average debt of 74,121 rupees, while the average monthly income of a farming family is only 10,218 rupees. The average size of household-owned holdings of farmers is also decreasing. Out of 93.1 million farming families in the country, more than 70 percent, i.e., 65.6 million, have less than 1 hectare of land. Only 0.4 percent of farming families in the country have more than 10 hectares of land.
Kumari Selja said that the poor condition of farmers can be understood from the fact that each farming family has an average of 0.876 hectares of land. Due to continuous debt, between 2012 and 2022, 114,695 farmers have committed suicide. This means that 31 lives are lost every day. Farmers are indebted to banks, the government, cooperative societies, and moneylenders and are unable to repay this debt on time. Kumari Selja said that Haryana’s farmers rank fourth in the country in terms of debt. That means, in terms of poor conditions, they are in the top 4. There are 1.906 million farming families here, of which 0.906 million families are in debt, which is 47.5 percent of the total farming families. The average debt on these families is 182,000 rupees. Despite all this, the BJP government of the state has not once presented a report showing the reality here to the central BJP government. This shows that the double-engine government is completely anti-farmer.
