Investigating the impact of economic policies on farmer suicides in India

Farmer suicides in India - often characterised as symptomatic of a larger agrarian ‘crisis’ in India - has persisted since the 1990s. This paper investigates the impact that the design and implementation of economic policies has on farmer suicides. It does so by identifying a set of economic ‘risk’ factors that impact farmers’ vulnerability to committing suicide, and consequently, examining the interaction of policies with these risks. Using an Agrarian Political Economy framework, and a longitudinal analysis from 2011 to 2024, this paper scrutinizes national and state-level policies that purportedly address agricultural productivity and resilience. However, these policies (in practice) often reinforce existing inequalities by privileging elites. This paper finds that the appropriation of surplus value, elite capture, and poor public data management are mechanisms that obscure the true extent of farmer suicides and affect topdown decisions on investment and protections, as well as the bottom-up reporting of the success of the policy implementation. All of which is characterised by the extensive use of erroneous data.