New policies spelling death knell of rural economy: Arundhati Roy

New Delhi, Mar 6 (UNI) Noted Litterateur Arundhati Roy today said the new economic policies of the Centre and state governments had led to a break down of the rural economy by taking away from the farmers their sources of livelihood.

''On the one hand, the Government is coming up with an Employment Guarantee Act to provide 100 days of guaranteed employment to the unemployed while on the other hand they are taking away from the rural folk, like farmers, their source of livelihood,''Arundhati Roy told reporters here while taking up cudgels for a group of poor widows from Kerala who are in the capital to demand that they should not be asked to pay the loans taken by their dead farmer-husbands.

According to her, the new economic model laid an increasing emphasis on the corporatisation of the economy wherein people in the villages get robbed of their resources and means to lead their life on their own terms.

Pointing out to an increase in the number of suicides among farmers in various parts of the country due to their inability to repay their huge loans taken for agricultural purposes, the litterateur said,''we have a policy wherein 700 million people subsisting on teh rural economy are being forced to sell their farm lands due to their indebtedness and forced to become hawkers in cities like Delhi where they constantly dread the terror of the MCD axe.'' In this context, she cited the example of the nearly 50 widows from the Wayanad district of Kerala who have been staging protests for the last many days for being forced to repay the loans their husbands had taken for agricultural purposes.

The women are among the wives of the more than 1800 farmers in Wayanad district of Kerala who committed suicide after failed crops and mounting debts in the past few years.

The litterateur also lamented the media apathy towards the plight of th widows.

''The agitating widows were in Delhi when US President George Bush visited the capital last week. During the three days Bush was here the media reported every minute detail of his visit- what Bush ate, how Laura Bush interacted with the Chamki and Boombah and so on - but the agitation by the widows went unnoticed. This is just another example of the corporatisation of the economy,''Roy said.

''These are the farmers who produce spices, coffee and tea for our nation, and now that these people are being forced to commit suicide because of no fault of theirs (the crisis from 2001 to 2006), the media seems to have ignored them, preferring to put the Bush visit on its front pages,''she said.

Wayanad, a part of the Nilgiri heritage zone in the tip of deccan plateau, is endowed with rich biological diversity. It also houses more than 69000 small and marginal cultivator households who are engaged in production of important spices including pepper, Cardamom, Ginger, Cinnamon and Coffee, among a significant foreign exchange earner of the country.

''Wayanad is a beautiful place and so it is heartbreaking to see people in such a beautiful place driven to suicide,''Roy said.

UNI AR VD PM1930