Here, I partly reproduce a mail sent to a friend abroad with some additional writing. Thought some of you might be interested:

The other day, I was speaking to a bureaucrat, who offers me a very typical take of the farmers' problem. Over the years, I have been watching thousands of acres of farmland disappear to make way for industrial, commercial and residential constructions.
I was asking him if he has any idea how much land has thus been sacrificed to so-called progress. He said urbanisation is an inevitable process and one must not resent it if villages disappear. I told him the farmers take the lumpsum money given for their fields and then have no steady source of income.
But he was on to bigger things. Even if villages dont exist in Maharashtra, he told me, it doesn’t matter because we the people don’t depend on the state for grains or pulses. We only get our fruits and veggies from our neighbourhood.
So what's the big deal? he said. Most farmers grow jowar and bajri for local consumption. That shouldnt bother us city slickers, he argued. When I pointed out the state’s popular crop, sugarcane, to him, he said only cash crops grow in Maharashtra for real sales and they don’t suffer. So it's perfectly alright if they die or sell their fields.
I remembered cotton but i decided to stop this silly conversation before it got more inane. When I told him Punjab and Haryana, the wheat bowl of India, too were seeing farmer suicides every day, he said, oh yes, but that should not concern us because Maharastra cannot do anything about it.
He implied thus that our concerns should be limited to what we can do something about. How callous and self-absorbed can we get?
If you look at how these dead farmers' families get relief, it's even more pathetic. Some junior official peeps into his home, asks his family questions. If he finds a family problem, there is no way the family gets any money; the suicide is promptly attributed to internal problems even if he has a huge outstanding debt staring in everyone’s face. If the land is not his name, he is doomed, and so on. And, just how much does this dead farmer get anyway if he kills himself? All of one lakh rupees, which comes, if it does, after six whole months or more. Some of these process have now been streamlined. But again, as someone said, one cannot take pride in giving prompt `compensation’ (such a disgusting term!) when we couldnt prevent the farmer from killing himself in the first place.
I seriously cannot understand what's wrong with us as people that we cant see the suicides clearly as something very wrong, unethical, unequal and outrageous.
The world over, the pattern of development is skewed. Urban agglomerates thrive at the cost of villages which ironically provide the feed for this parasitical growth.
India being agrarian (soon, we will saying this in the past tense), it cannot afford to blink at the problems facing its villagers. The entire community fabric of the village –its culture, spirit, and self-reliance, -- is coming apart. The crafts are dying, there is no colour left in the green belts, and the fields are starved of water, power.
The way I see it, we are paying the price for ignoring Gandhiji. India lives in its villages, he said, implying thereby and saying it loudly on too many occasions as well, take care of the farmer and his village and you will have taken India on the road to prosperity. Today, India lives in two halves—one half is upwardly mobile, prosperous and a go-getting wannabe while the second is a stark picture of poverty, deprivation and hunger. We depend on the villages instead of the other way round. So, shouldn’t wealth too flow from there instead of the other way round?
Even if you don’t agree with this argument, we urbanites are directly affected by this neglect of our rural countrymen. Thanks to ceaseless migration, life in cities has become difficult for each one of us. At least for that reason, lets speak up and stem the rot.