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Title: Need to provide adequate compensation to the families of farmers who committed suicides in Western Orissa and also provide compensation to farmers who suffered crop-failure in the State.
SHRI BHAKTA CHARAN DAS (KALAHANDI): More than 60 farmers in western Orissa have committed suicide due to crop-failure and subsequent heavy burden of debt. Forty-three farmers killed themselves towards the end of 2009. All of them having been small farmers, entirely dependent on monsoon for irrigation, sudden inflation culminating into their inaccessibility to expensive fertilizers and pesticides and their indebtedness from moneylenders between Rs. 10,000/- to 25,000/- at exorbitant rates some as high as 25 per cent, are some of the reasons for farmers’ suicides.
Orissa has never seen farmers’ suicide at this scale. Forty-three suicides are unprecedented. It is a distressing trend for a state where 80% farmers are small and marginal.
Over 40 farmers, most of them from western Orissa, have committed suicide in the last two months because of crop failure, erratic rainfall and attack by caterpillars. Despite this, the incidents of suicides by farmers are not being taken note of and they are bring denied the much needed support and those farmers who have been given Silver Card and Gold Card as a mark of identities, they too have not yet received crop loss compensation or insurance benefits as announced by the State Government.