India may be one of the world’s current economic ‘winners’ but inequality is its fastest-growing sector, reveals Jaideep Hardikar.
‘We have no right to dream.’
This is what a woman peasant in central India’s cotton-growing regions told me the day after her husband, a marginal peasant farmer, took his own life. His forlorn cotton fields had been wrecked by drought. She was the latest to enter widowhood; her husband the latest to join an ever-lengthening list of rural suicides. Between 1995 and 2010 more than a quarter of a million peasant farmers have taken their own lives in the Indian countryside.
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