Ag-pe=mfs (Agriculture-primary education = mass farm suicides)

The overwhelming majority of the country™s academics, media pundits and intellectuals in their ivory towers seem unable to connect dismal quality primary education being dispensed in rural India with rising farm suicides Dilip Thakore ON APRIL 28, HARESHBHAI JASMATBHAI RABADIA, a 34-year-old agriculturist who farmed seven acres of land in Bhader village in the Rajkot district of Gujarat ” India™s showpiece state which had recorded the country™s highest annual rates of agriculture growth under the stewardship of its long-serving chief minister (2001-14) Narendra Modi, since elevated to prime minister following the sweeping victory of the BJP in General Election 2014 ” hung himself  to death from a tree in his farm. Shortly thereafter, his wife Bhavisha unable to bear the loss, immolated herself. The couple leave behind a six-month-old girl child to confront a dangerous and uncertain future in a society in which child abuse and trafficking is rampant. Earlier on World Earth Day (April 22) Gajendra Singh, a 41-year-old farmer from Rajasthan hanged himself from a tree during a public rally called by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi to protest the Central government™s Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011 which is pending parliamentary approval. Even after Singh™s suicide which was broadcast live on national television, Delhi chief minister and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal continued to address the estimated 12,000 crowd for 15 minutes. A relatively prosperous agriculturist whose family farmed ten acres in Dausa village in Rajasthan, Singh leaves three orphaned children behind. These are just two farmer suicides which have captured media attention in recent times. Every day, 32 farmers in rural India kill themselves, driven to despair by agrarian poverty, unrepayable debts, non-legislation of personal bankruptcy laws and almost total absence of a law, order  and justice enforcement and dispensation machinery in the rural hinterlands of 21st century India whose vainglorious politicians and self-centred 250 million-strong middle class, nurture UN Security Council membership and superpower ambitions. According to the latest available statistics of the National Crimes Bureau, 11,772 rural citizens took their own lives in 2013. A study conducted by the Madras Institute of Development Studies in 2008 says that over 200,000 farmers across the country killed themselves in the period 1995-2007. And although popular economist Swaminathan Aiyar, a product of the callous Nehruvian era when in Soviet/Maoist-style millions of peasants were starved to fund disastrous heavy industry public sector ventures, argues (Times of India, May 3) that proportionately to their population (60 percent), farmer suicides are normative, he is contradicted by award-winning journalist P. Sainath whose series of essays written from ground zero for The Hindu, has established that suicide rates among farmers are 47 percent higher than in other vocations. According to Sainath, 270,940 farmers countrywide committed suicide in the period 1995-2013 (The Hindu, May 18, 2013). Even though conscientious intellectuals within academia and the media have highlighted the paradox of post-independence India™s centrally planned socio-economic development model in which the contribution of 60-70 percent of the population engaged in agriculture…