A statistical study of suicide and agrarian distress in India
A Short Study from Shiva’s Own Research Organisation
Farmers Suicides in India is a brief book jointly credited to Vandana Shiva and Kunwar Jalees, issued in New Delhi in 2005 by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology — the organisation Shiva founded in 1982 for research on science, technology and environmental policy, and the body out of which her seed-and-agriculture initiative Navdanya later grew. It is a compact work, running to about fifty pages and illustrated, and it carries statistical tables together with a bibliography. That apparatus signals its character: this is an evidentiary, data-led publication rather than a narrative or polemical essay, and the numbers it assembles are meant to be inspected rather than simply asserted.
Farmer Suicide as Recorded Fact
The book’s subject matter is stated directly by its title and confirmed by the way it is classified: suicide in India, statistics of suicide in India, and the suicidal behaviour of farmers in India and its statistical record. Its concern is therefore twofold — the general problem of suicide as a measurable social phenomenon in India, and the particular concentration of that problem among farming households. The inclusion of tables and a reference list indicates that the study gathers official figures and other documented data and presents them alongside supporting sources, giving readers a compact record of what the numbers show.
Placed in the context of Shiva’s work, the book belongs to her long engagement with Indian agriculture — the field in which she has written and campaigned on intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology and genetic engineering, and in which she has argued for the protection of native seed and diverse, organic farming over monoculture. A study devoted to the suicide figures of farm households addresses the human cost of that agricultural landscape, and it does so at the level of recorded cases rather than anecdote.
Seeds, Debt and a Contested Count
Shiva’s public argument about farming and suicide has been closely tied to her opposition to genetically modified cotton. During protests against Bt cotton trials in India in 1998 she characterised the technology in terms of suicide, slavery and despair, and in opinion writing she has maintained that seed monopolies, royalty payments on proprietary seed, reliance on purchased inputs and the vulnerability of monoculture together create the conditions for debt and agrarian distress, describing genetically modified seed as suicidal in a systemic rather than a literal sense. Those are campaigning and commentary positions, distinct from the data-focused study published in 2005.
The figures themselves have been disputed. The International Food Policy Research Institute, analysing academic articles and government data on two separate occasions, concluded that farmer suicides in India had declined and found no evidence of a resurgence. A reader approaching Farmers Suicides in India therefore encounters it at the centre of a live and unresolved argument — between a body of recorded statistics on deaths in farming households and competing readings of whether, and why, those deaths were rising. The book’s contribution lies in marshalling the record itself, which is the ground on which that argument has been conducted.
The library record for Farmers Suicides in India gives its collation as iv, 51 pages, 28 cm, with the bibliography at page 51. Its Library of Congress call number is HV6548.I5 S55 2005, and the University of British Columbia holds one copy in the Koerner Library stacks on Floor 1.
RFSTE, Navdanya and the Seed Banks
The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991. The source records that the name translates as “Nine Seeds” or “New Gift,” and that Navdanya established over 40 seed banks across India to provide regional opportunity for diverse agriculture.
Biopiracy Cases Tied to the Same Organisation
At RFSTE, Shiva and her team challenged the biopiracy of neem, basmati and wheat. In 2005, one of the three organisations that won a ten-year battle in the European Patent Office against the biopiracy of neem by the US Department of Agriculture and the corporation WR Grace was Shiva’s. Navdanya began a campaign in 1998 against the biopiracy of basmati rice by the US corporation RiceTec Inc.; in 2001, after intensive campaigning, RiceTec lost most of its claims to the patent.
