Suicides and the making of India's agrarian distress

Abstract Reviewing data from five states of India, where suicides by agriculturists reached epidemic levels, this paper provides a sociological commentary to the issue. Unking macro and micro economic factors to social structural and symbolic meanings. the article highlights the ways in which the Green Revolution, as a model of modern agriculture, acts as a trap and induces a range of risks in the lives of agriculturists. Such conditions of distress are compounded by the social structuring of commercial agriculture that has led to ‘agricultural individualisation’ and the spread of new social demands. These trends combine with the larger context of a neo-liberal political economy where agricultural issues and agriculturists are in a state of ‘advanced marginality’, and account for the making of a crisis in which large numbers of agriculturists have taken their lives.