ISLAMABAD: Three of India's five worst-hit states for farmer suicides have been governed for most of the past decade by the Bharatiya Janata Party or its allies. Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh together accounted for most of the 10,786 farming-sector suicides recorded nationally in 2023, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
The toll has not gone down under BJP-led administrations despite repeated promises of loan waivers and relief packages, the same records show.
Maharashtra remains the country's epicenter. The state accounted for 38.5% of the total suicides in 2023. Under the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition from 2014 to 2019, the state recorded between 3,594 and 4,291 suicides a year.
When the BJP alliance returned to power in 2022, the toll did not drop. The state recorded 4,248 suicides that year and 4,151 in 2023, according to the same records.
Less than 12% of farmland in the Vidarbha and Marathwada cotton belt is irrigated, and pink bollworm resistance has repeatedly reduced cotton yields, according to research on the political economy of agrarian distress published in the Journal of Political Science. Loan waivers issued across successive Fadnavis and Mahayuti governments have not addressed this underlying structural gap, the research states.
Karnataka tells a similar story. Under BJP rule from 2019 to 2023, the state recorded 2,392 farming-sector suicides in both 2021 and 2022, according to NCRB figures, accounting for roughly 22.5% of the national total in 2023.
Drought and groundwater depletion in northern Karnataka have continued unaddressed through multiple BJP budgets, while farmers in the Mandya and Haveri sugarcane belts remain locked into high-cost informal land leases.
No sustained expansion of irrigation accompanied the state's BJP-era relief announcements, the records show.
In Andhra Pradesh, now governed by a TDP-led NDA coalition with the BJP since 2024, 927 farming-sector suicides were recorded in 2023. Between 2014 and 2022, the state reported 7,732 total suicides in the sector, with agricultural laborers (4,035) outnumbering land-owning cultivators (3,375), according to a factsheet on farm suicides published by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM).
Small and marginal farmers make up 86.3% of landholders in the state but own only 54% of the land, the factsheet states, a gap that has persisted under every administration, including the current BJP-aligned government.
Two more BJP-governed states show the same pattern. Madhya Pradesh, under BJP leadership for most of the decade, recorded 641 farming-sector suicides in 2022 and 777 in 2023, an increase under continuous BJP rule, according to NCRB data.
Uttar Pradesh, governed by the BJP since 2017 under Yogi Adityanath, recorded a 42.13% jump in total farming-sector suicides in 2022 compared with the previous year, according to a study on farmers' suicides published by Kerala Journal of Psychiatry, even as state officials pointed to the region's historically low totals.
The pattern that emerges from BJP-led states is not one of crisis management but of crisis administration. Compensation eligibility in these states remains tied to formal land titles and proof of institutional bank debt, a requirement that excludes tenant farmers, women farmers, and landless laborers who borrow from informal moneylenders, according to the SOPPECOM factsheet.
In Maharashtra, families must prove landownership, crop failure in that specific cycle, and outstanding institutional debt simply to qualify for the state's 100,000 Indian rupees ($1,056) ex gratia payment, the factsheet states.
Suicides linked to informal moneylender debt, the kind most common among the very farmers BJP governments claim to protect, are officially classified as ineligible.
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