Backward and forward marketing patterns, hurdles and resultant net negative returns for agricultural produce by the farmers’ suicides affected victim’s households from Maharashtra

Marathwada and Vidarbha are known as the regions most affected by farmer suicides. During the last thirty years in India the pandemic of farmer suicides has taken the toll of more than 3.5 lac lives. Most of the suicides occured in the agrarian states. These states are Andhra Pradesh (now includes Telangana), Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab and Maharashtra. Farmer suicides are also recorded from other parts of the country like Gujarat and Bundelkhand in Madhya Pradesh but they are less in number. Suicide by farmers across the states is not the outcome of poverty but it is an outcome of the negative gap between the expected and the actual income received from cultivation. The regions of high incidence of suicides in Maharashtra state are Marathwada and Vidarbha. It has become a complex phenomenon to understand as to why in last thirty years the state has been unable to arrest the suicide. The first farmer suicide case of Maharashtra was confirmed in 1986 from Yavatmal district of western Vidarbha. Ever since then Yavatmal district has been at the top of the list of farmer suicides at all India level. During the same period in a southern state of Kerala in July 1986 a rubber growing farmer had ended his life through suicide. These incidences in fact had marked the beginning of the pandemic of farmer suicides in India. The paper analyses the reasons and trends of farm suicides in Maharashtra.