Farmers’ Distress in Cauvery Delta Region of Tamil Nadu - An Analysis

Abstract

Persistent monsoon failure for the past three years has led to distress condition widely prevalent among the farming community in our country. Tamil Nadu in specific, faced crop failures all over the state with the Cauvery Delta region worst hit. For the first time, the state witnessed a total of 89 farmer deaths including 32 farmers who killed themselves. Hence there was a pressing need to take up this study on distress among farmers so as to address their problems in future. The total number of farmer's deaths and suicides reported officially were 19 and two respectively in Nagapattinam district. In the case of Thiruvarur district it was 18 deaths and three suicides respectively. The respondents were selected by following saturated sampling procedure. Accordingly, all the 37 families of the deceased farmers were selected as respondents for the study. Most of the farmers were male and found to be old aged. Nearly half of them had primary education alone, while more than half of the farmers had Agriculture as the only occupation. Nearly two-third of the farmers belonged to the backward communities, whereas their social participation was low in this case. More than half of the farmers were introvert, which might have contributed to the distress condition. One-fourth of the deceased farmers were marginal farmers. Most of the farmers were indebted to a greater extent under both institutional and private sources. This paper discusses in detail about the socio economic profile of farmers who died out of distress situation.