| THE Roman Catholic Church’s social arm in India, Caritas, is responding to a wave of farmers’ suicides across the country.
In 2006, farmers’ suicides in central India numbered 1452. Official statistics record 4000 in the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala; independent sources suggest 18,000. Market policies, lack of affordable credit, corrupt middlemen, and indifferent administration are blamed for pushing farmers to breaking-point.
Caritas, which works with 350 partner NGOs and 250,000-self-help groups, will use micro-credit groups in a national programme piloted in Kerala. Church sources say that 2000 farmers who joined self-help groups did not commit suicide. “We successfully implemented an integrated programme in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and were able to contain suicides in those areas,” says the executive director of Caritas, Fr Varghese Mattamana. The farmers’ plight will be a theme in the observance of Lent.
In Kerala, the Malankara Syriac Orthodox Bishop of Malabar, Dr Yuhanon Mor Philaxinos, told the news agency ENI that the suicides showed that people were “very weak in faith”. He blamed welfare programmes that offered compensation, froze loan recoveries, and even wrote off of entire loans for the dead farmers’ families. Suicide had “gained great social acceptability”, he said. But “If people are committing suicide when they find the going tough, then faith becomes meaningless.”
Bad debts from droughts, and a crash in the prices of produce such as pepper, ginger, and coffee had made farmers unable to repay loans, ENI reported.
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