That the agricultural sector in India is in the grips of a crisis is no longer denied even by the most ardent advocate of neoliberal policies. The economic reforms implemented from around the middle of 1991 have had far-reaching – and, mostly adverse – consequences for almost every aspect of socio-economic and cultural life in the country. The impact of these policies on the agrarian economy has been particularly severe, often with tragic consequences. For several years, though, this situation was hardly noticed, even by the critics of the neoliberal policies. It thus remained a 'silent crisis' until about the middle of the 1990s, when the news of large-scale farmer suicides was suddenly picked up and widely reported upon – at which point it became a major political issue.
Today, the agrarian crisis is no longer a 'silent crisis'. Yet the advocates of neoliberal policies remain in a state of denial with respect to the underlying causes. They would like the rest of the country to believe that there has not been enough market-oriented economic reform in agriculture – and that this is the reason for the poor state of the sector. In fact, this is a complete misrepresentation of what is taking place on Indian farms today. With regard to farmer suicides, too, initially there were attempts to dismiss press reports as the product of fevered imaginations. Such dismissals were certainly helped along by the fact that the sources that both the journalists and activists were depending upon were rather uncoordinated and sporadic in the initial phase of the suicide epidemic. These denials were short-lived, however, because the data brought out by the government's own agencies soon clearly established the magnitude of the crisis.
Once the volume of farmer suicides could no longer be denied, another set of denials cropped up. The reason why farmers commit suicide, it was claimed, has nothing to do with the agrarian crisis; in fact, it was suggested, most would have committed suicide anyway, due to problems with alcoholism, conspicuous spending on marriages or mental depression. Ultimately, such allegations were made to guard the 'sacrosanct' nature of neoliberal reforms: if there are farmer suicides, they are not due to an agrarian crisis; and if there is an agrarian crisis, it is not due to neoliberal reforms. Such arguments are cynical and outright dangerous. The data clearly points to the magnitude of the problem of farmer suicides – and all evidence points to the strong relationship between this phenomenon and the farm crisis, which in turn is the product of neoliberal policies implemented by India starting in 1991.
From the mid-1990s, official data from the National Crime Records Bureau (the NCRB, part of the Home Ministry) proved that, far from being products of fevered imaginations, large-scale farmer suicides were taking place in India during the period of liberalisation. The NCRB started publishing such data beginning in 1995, and information for all states is available from 1997 onwards, put together from police records. The latest figures available on farmer suicides are from 2008. If anything, this underestimates the actual magnitude of the problem for the simple reason that the definition of a farmer in these records is far too narrow, since only someone who owns and operates land is considered a farmer. Thus, a poor tenant who owns no land, operating only on leased land, would not be considered a farmer by this definition. Yet even these figures, underestimates though they are, paint a horrendous picture.