In Moga, suicide-hit farm families and politicians come face-to-face

BATHINDA:Successive governments have merely paid lip service and not helped out families which have lost their loved ones to farm-debt suicides. This was a sentiment shared by one speaker after another at an event organized in Moga for such families on Saturday.

With politicians in front of them, the families shared problems they faced in getting aid from the state and if they even got any assistance.

Freedom fighter Bhagat Singh’s nephew Prof Jagmohan Singh participated in the event too. He supported the demand for compensation to suicide-hit families. “The concept of holding gram sabhas should be popularized in villages where issues of aggrieved families should be debated. Suicides could be curtailed if woes of aggrieved are listened and solutions reached,” he said.

A woman from Jhunir village in Mansa, Kiranjit Kaur, whose father committed suicide on April 23, 2016, after he could not pay a loan of Rs 8 lakh, was the brains behind the dialogue. Surveys by Punjabi University in Patiala, Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU) in Amritsar, and Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) in Ludhiana, show that nearly 16,700 farmers and farmhands committed suicide between 2000 and 2015 in Punjab. The state government gives Rs 3 lakh to a suicide-hit family if proved the step was taken over rising debt.

Kiranjit, who heads the Kisan Mazdoor Khudkushi Peerat Parivar Committee, said her family owned three acres of farmland and had an outstanding loan of Rs 8 lakh.

The Congress MLA from Moga, Harjot Kamal, also attended the event. He said committing suicide was not the way forward to solving the problem of farm debt. “We must be courageous in these times of distress. We need to muster up courage to face our problems,” he said.