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        Dr Vandana Shiva has brilliantly described the Indian economy as a whole today as 'The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation.' In this besieged economy, the helpless Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction.

        Media in India have been recently reporting that up to 2,200 farmers have killed themselves in the last 15 years, partly crushed by overwhelming financial pressures. According to another media story, at least 1,000 farmers in India have claimed their own lives since May of this year alone. I cannot help viewing the growing incidence of suicides by farmers as an epidemic. Estimates for the overall number of deaths among farmers in the four southern States since 2001 range from 3,600 to 18,000. Farming makes up just a fifth of India's $665bn economy, but it feeds two-thirds of the population. A bad monsoon can spell life or death for millions of India's forgotten farmers.

        Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide in Maharashtra in recent years. Recently our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a package of relief measures to the farmers in Maharashtra after a two-day tour of the Vidarbha region which has seen unprecedented cotton crop failure and falling prices. The Indian government has announced aid worth nearly $815m (£444m) to crisis-hit cotton farmers in this State. Under the package, farmers will have debts cleared and will gain easy access to seeds and interest-free loans. Projects for improving irrigation and support for families who cannot survive on farming alone have also been included. Similar packages will be drawn up for the States of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka, which have also seen a rising wave of suicides among farmers.

Dr.Vandana Shiva has succinctly summed up the position: 'Two-thirds of India makes its living from the land. The Earth is the most generous employer in this country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more than 5000 years. However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, the climate and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced by Indian peasants.'         Available data shows that 1990-2000 was not a happy decade for Indian agriculture. The overall growth rate of CROP PRODUCTION declined from 3.72 per cent per annum in the previous decade (1980-1990) to 2.29 per cent in the next decade (1990-2000). Likewise CROP PRODUCTIVITY fell from 2.99 per cent per annum in the decade (1980 -1990) to 1.21 per cent in the next decade (1990-2000). Average yield levels of rice and wheat have more than halved between 1986 and 2002. The output of crops grown and eaten by the poorest of the poor (coarse grains, pulses and oil seeds) and grown largely in the dry lands, actually declined perceptibly during the period 1990-2000. The rate of growth of food grains production also fell steeply from 2.92 per cent recorded between 1980 / 83 and 1990 / 93 to 1.08 per cent during 1990 / 93 to 2000 / 03.         For the first time since the mid-sixties, the 1990s witnessed a rate of growth in food grain production, which was lower than the rate of growth of population. As a result, both per capita food grain production and availability were lower in 2000-'03 than their pre-Green Revolution (1960- '63) levels. The decline has been the sharpest in the 1990s as will be clear from the table below.

Parthasarathy Committee report

        A major reason for the slowdown in agriculture seems to be the precipitous fall in public investment in agriculture. The decline has been quite sharp in absolute terms and as a proportion to gross capital formation in agriculture and overall public sector gross capital formation.

        In the context of declining Indian agriculture and rising levels of poverty among the small and marginal farmers and landless agricultural workers in the ever drought-prone pockets of India, amidst the growing tragedy of rising suicide rates among the farmers in these backward areas, the recent Report of the Technical Committee on Watershed Programmes in India, called 'FROM HARIYALI TO NEERANCHAL', brought out by Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India in January 2006 assumes a great national significance.

        Terms of Reference of the Parthasarathy Committee:-

        A Technical Committee on Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP), Desert Development Programme (DDP), and Integrated Waterlands Development Programme (IWDP ) Programmes was constituted by the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), with Shri. S. Parthasarathy, IAS (Retd) as its Chairman. (Govern-ment of India vide its Order No. S-16011/1/2004-DPAP dated 14 February 2005). The Committee was requested to look into the watershed program imple-mentation in the country on following aspects and suggest recommendations to make it more effective.

        *  To identify the areas under DPAP, DDP and IWDP where existing watershed approach is not feasible for implementation and suggest alternative mechanisms to suitably introduce special provisions in the Guidelines for Watershed Development.

        *  To examine the issues of people's participation, alternative livelihoods, maintenance of assets and sustainable equity in sharing of resources and recommend strategies thereof for more effective delivery of benefits to the community under watershed programmes.

        *  To examine the possibility and suggest ways of public-private partnership for increasing investment in Drought Prone Areas Programme (DPAP), Desert Development Programme (DDP), and Integrated Waterlands Development Programme (IWDP) to develop the areas in reasonable time-frame.

        The Parthasarathy Committee has attempted an exhaustive review of the experience of the watershed programme in India. While travelling to a large number of watersheds, the Committee met all the State governments, heard and seen the work of leading NGOs, support agencies, think-tanks and researchers on watershed development, met bilateral agencies such as Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and DFID and bodies such as Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) organisations The review has revealed a large number of areas where major improvements are called for in India's watershed development programme.

        In my view, the Parthasarathy Committee Report is a path-breaking report in the field of Agriculture and Rural Development in India after the Balwanthrai Mehta Committee Report in the late 1950s after our independence. Unlike most Government of India reports, this is a very readable Report, quite reminiscent of the beautiful reports authored by ICS officers with personal love and dedication in British India. In his introduction Parthasarathy has beautifully observed: 'In the current generation of Watershed programmes there has been a serious effort to move away from a purely engineering and structural focus to a deeper concern with livelihood issues. This shift in approach is epitomised in the phrase 'watershed plus'. This change is more clearly seen in the voluntary sector where, not surprisingly, the approach is driven at all stages by the intensity of people's involvement in various activities of the watershed. This people-centred focus is more visible, pervasive and clearly articulated in the voluntary sector than in some of the more mechanically implemented, bureaucratically driven programmes, which are characterised by an obsession with outlays rather than outcomes and accounting rather than accountability.'

        The Parthasarathy Committee Report eloquently and poignantly brings out the stark fact that 'development' and 'under-development' in the dry pockets of India denote much more than economics and the much beaten track of simple quantitative measurement of income, employment and inequality. It is a state of mind as much as a state of poverty. It is shocking; the squalor, disease, unnecessary deaths and hopelessness of it all. No man ever understands if under-development remains for him a mere statistic reflecting low income, poor housing, premature mortality or underemployment. The most empathetic observer can speak objectively about underdevelopment in India only after undergoing, personally or vicariously, the shock of underdevelopment. This unique culture shock comes to one as he is initiated to the emotions which prevail in the 'culture of poverty'. The reverse shock is felt by those living in destitution when a new self-revelation comes to them that their life is neither human nor inevitable. The prevalent emotion of underdevelopment is a sense of personal and societal impotence in the face of disease and death, of confusion and ignorance as one gropes to understand change, of servility towards impersonal men and insensitive institutions whose decisions govern the course of events, of hopelessness before hunger and natural catastrophe. Chronic poverty is a cruel kind of hell.

        One cannot understand how cruel that hell is merely by gazing upon poverty as an ugly object. Informed by this kind of perceptive understanding of the forces at work in the remote rural areas of India, the Parthasarathy Committee has proposed feasible development policies and programmes for raising the living levels of the millions of rural poor in India.