The stories that one rarely—if at all—hears are the ones that define the epoch in which we live. Of that, there is no question. What is in question, however, is the degree to which we strive to hear these stories and how much we care to change the dispensation that has been wrought by us.

In “shining” India, farmers are killing themselves out of sheer desperation as their livelihoods and prospects have been destroyed by more than a decade of “liberalization” and the creation of a “globalized India.” There is a crisis afoot. And it is engulfing India—an agrarian crisis in a country whose life-blood is agriculture. This is a more important story than the TCS IPO or the Infosys stock price. It’s bigger than all of Bollywood. Along with HIV/AIDS and environmental despoliation, it’s the most important story out there. And until the courageous and path breaking work of journalist P. Sainath, it was a story going untold in the mainstream middle-class press. Sainath’s words are better than mine, so let me present some out-takes from his work.

From the report, When Farmers Die, filed June of this year:

Andhra Pradesh is in the midst of an agrarian Emergency. The tragic farmers’ suicides are an extreme symptom of a much deeper rural distress—the result of a decade-long onslaught on the livelihoods of millions. The crisis now goes way beyond the families ravaged by the suicides, and beyond the farming community itself. There is an urgent need to end the suicides. But doing so without addressing the larger distress is to try and mop the floor dry with the taps open. Over 300 farmers have taken their lives these past six weeks. And thousands since the structured assault on agriculture in Andhra Pradesh began years ago. For every farmer who has committed suicide, countless others face morale-sapping despair. Large numbers of people are also in a zone marked by growing hunger and a fragile equilibrium. There have been hunger deaths, too, this year. One more bad season could push many over the edge.

“Andhra Pradesh?!” you might exclaim. “I thought AP was in great shape thanks to laptop-carrying Chandrababu Naidu.” Sainath tells us otherwise—from his article Chandrababu: Image and Reality, filed in July:

…Still, a look at the myth of Mr. Naidu is key to grasping a lot of things. Including the gigantic crisis crippling Andhra Pradesh today. On most indicators, he ran the worst performing state in the south of India for nearly 10 years. Yet the more damage he did, the more his media standing grew. The gap between his image and his record is stunning.
No other figure in Indian politics got the kind of press that Mr. Naidu did. The ‘miracle man.’ The ‘GeneratioNext CM,’ and, of course, ‘The CEO of Andhra Pradesh.’ A larger than life image held up by huge spending on self-publicity helped this along. Ad gurus from Mumbai flew in to foster it. Our media lapped it up. And starry-eyed journalists from The New York Times, The Financial Times and heaps of other places, weighed in with their bit.

One has to examine the structural issues behind this. From the article The Policy has No Clothes also filed in July:

…what is more depressing is that the governments are clueless of the reasons that forces farmers to commit suicides. Nor is there any effort from the so-called distinguished agricultural scientists, economists, and social scientists to come up with proposals to put an end to this shameful blot on the country’s image. The reason is obvious. No one has the political courage to point a finger at the real villain—the industrial farming model that shifts the focus on cash crops and thereby plays havoc with sustainable livelihoods.

Chandrababu Naidu was swept away by a tidal wave of the angry farmers. The small and marginal farmers, in tandem with the landless labourers, who constitute nearly 80 per cent of Andhra’s 80 million people, gave their verdict: the industry-sponsored economic initiatives are anti-poor. In Karnataka too, where the farmers’ suicide rate is equally high, the over-emphasis on technology only alienated a large percentage of the farming population from economic growth and development. Both states had relied heavily on the British consultancy firm, McKinsey India Ltd., to draw up their blueprints for economic reforms. McKinsey’s services are also being utilised by West Bengal for redesigning its economic model of growth.

Blindly aping the World Bank model of agriculture, Karnataka and Andhra had pumped in huge finances to push an industry-driven agriculture that has not only exacerbated the crisis leading to an environmental catastrophe but also destroyed millions of rural livelihoods. As a result, both the states had turned into capitals of shame for farmers’ distress, visible more through the increasing rate of suicides in the rural areas. Making cheap credit available to these marginal farming communities, an intention announced by the Finance Minister, will not be helpful. What these poor need immediately is income support.

The story Death of a Carpenter puts a name and face to those who are otherwise nameless and faceless. No one had ordered a plough in three years. Nor axe and spade handles either. Which meant that Bangaru Ramachari, who made tools and implements for farmers, was in trouble. He had been Mukundapuram’s sole carpenter for years. He owned no land or cattle and was not a farmer. But his well being depended on how agriculture in this village in Nalgonda fared. “When farming does badly,” says S. Srinivas, a political activist here, “everyone does badly. Not just farmers.” Ramachari did worse. He died of hunger. In a village that falls in the command area of the Left Canal of the Nagarjun Sagar project. Where farming had earlier done well for years. That we have people in India who are dying of hunger and farmers so unbelievably desperate that they give up all hope should shock us all into examining the system from which we all benefit. Globalization means different things to different people. To corporate apologists it is used to indicate “freedom to prosper.” To apologists for U.S. hegemony, it is used to indicate “democracy and the export of ‘civilization.”
Bunk.

To the farmers of Andhra Pradesh—and as we’ll soon see, in all states of India—globalization means economic distress, hunger, and sometimes death. This is not that dawn for which we set out in sheer longing.