Paying the price for India's boom
Updated on 01 May 2007
Krishnan Guru-Murthy looks at how farmers are bearing the brunt of India's economic boom.
India is enjoying a major economic boom, its growth is 9 per cent a year, second only to China, and with its population over a billion, it will overtake Europe and Japan and become the world's third largest economy.
But that rapid growth comes at a price and in rural India, they are feeling it and India's trade minister has said that 200m will have to move from farming to the factories and it is that transition that is causing controversy.
Maharastra is the financial capital but is also home to the suicide capital of India as farmers have been driven to debt and have been taking their lives.
Across the country many others are simply having their land taken away to make room for all these industries.
The new India is shooting up at an astonishing rate, at the heart of the economic boom, information technology, a retail explosion and of course, call centres.
Until last week, Jet2 Holidays, A Yorkshire-based airline, was using its base in Britain for its holiday business, today it has moved to just outside Delhi.
Industrial parks
On the outskirts of cities, huge industrial parks are growing very night where it just used to be farmland and that is the problem because the penalty for all this growth is being paid by those who used to work the land.
Many farmers had their land taken over by the government using compulsory purchase laws. In the countryside, where three quarters of people who live off the land, a bigger tragedy is unfolding.
Most farmers only a few hectares of land, but they have had to buy tractors, buy fertiliser and it has pushed many people into debt, not just to banks but to private money lenders.
Many have found their debts too much to bear, and there has been a wave of suicides of those unable to see a way out.
Campaigners say the Indian government underestimates the scale of suicide, they claim 100,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives.
MS Swaminathan, credited for powering India's green revolution in the 1960s, said: "Do you want to have a land of 500m landless labourers, if they do, the people will be completely ruined."
The divides of rich and poor may one day be solved by the economic boom trickling down but how much of this pain is India prepared to stomach on the way?
