14th November,2015 on Saturday at 4:30 pm at Anveshi, Hyderabad.
Abstract
The current spate of farmers’ suicides draws concern over the serious plight of farmers who are unable to wriggle out the debt traps under the drought for the second consequent year. Even though the suicide rate has gone up acutely in the current year, the phenomenon of suicides by farmers which began in the mid-nineties has been an on-going one. It is mostly small and marginal farmers who constitute lion’s share of the suicides. This demands a closer look at the conditions of farming of this class in the agrarian structure that seem to create the objective conditions of distress. It is also important to analyze the sustainability and viability of small peasantry under capitalism when the agriculturesector as a whole is subjected to unequal exchange with industry & service sectors. The small peasants at the bottom of the agrarian structure faces even greater marginalization. A specific feature that has emerged in Indian agriculture is that 90 percent of farmers today are the petty commodity producers, whose farming in not capable of producing a sustainable livelihood. The speaker brings some empirical evidence for some of the propositions in this understanding and draws attention to structural conditions that circumscribe the small farmer distress and the larger measures called for to recover from the crisis.
R.V.Ramana Murthy, studied economics at University of Hyderabad, and has been teaching economics for the past 16 years. He is currently at School of Economics, University of Hyderabad. He has published several articles in refereed journals and done 5 project reports in the areas of migration, structural change in Indian economy, inflation, issues in paddy and cotton farming, production conditions of small farming, political economy of global financial crisis, and law & economics. He also writes commentaries on economic issues in Telugu newspapers.
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