Crushed by debts many farmers in India kill themselves at a rate of 48 a day between 2002 and 2006 – more than 17,500 a year, according to experts who have analyzed government statistics. At least 160,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997, said K. Nagaraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. The epidemic dates to the 1990s, and is generally attributed to a toxic blend of slashed subsidies, tougher global competition, drought, predatory moneylenders and expensive genetically modified seeds. “It's one of the largest public health disasters to hit India since independence,” said professor Charles Nuckols of Brigham Young University, an anthropologist who has studied Indian village life for decades. A decade ago, the government began cutting farm subsidies as it liberalized the managed socialist economy. The farmers' costs rose as the tariffs that had protected their products were lowered. It was a combination, analysts say, that made small farms even harder to sustain. Meanwhile, banking reforms forced farmers to be more dependent on private moneylenders. These generally allow the farmers only 11 months to pay back their loans at interest rates of more than 100 percent a year, or else they seize the land at a drastically reduced rate. One village moneylender, said the number of farmers unable to repay their loans has increased by roughly 30 percent in the last 10 years.
