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Vidarbha Tenant Farmers Missing from Records, Deaths Uncounted

Tenant farmer in Vidarbha without land records sitting in field as cultivation continues behind him
Missing land records in Vidarbha leave tenant farmers uncounted in official death and policy data

Every year, India's National Crime Records Bureau releases figures on farmer suicides. These numbers feed directly into welfare schemes, relief allocations, and agricultural policy decisions that are meant to address one of the country's most persistent crises. But built into this data collection is a structural gap that has never been formally corrected.


The NCRB counts a death as a farmer suicide only when the deceased's name appears on an official land title document.


In Vidarbha alone, more than 80 per cent of cultivators are small and marginal farmers, a substantial portion of whom work land they do not legally own. When these farmers die, their deaths are not counted as farmer deaths.


They are filed under different categories, or not properly filed at all, and the policy response that follows is calibrated to a number that does not reflect what actually happened.


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When cultivation has no paper trail


The first gap opens long before a death is counted. India still has a very large tenant farming economy that lives in partial paperwork or no paperwork at all.


The World Bank, using National Sample Survey data, noted that nearly 21.3 million rural households reported leasing land in 2013.

Even that figure was flagged as an underestimate because so much leasing remained informal. Only 13 per cent of the leased-in area was registered.


 NITI Aayog used similar language when it said restrictive tenancy laws had forced leasing into informal, insecure arrangements. Once tenancy goes underground, the cultivator who actually works the land is separated from the record that government departments often use to identify a farmer.


That split matters because farm policy increasingly begins with the record, not the field. In Maharashtra, the key document is the 7/12 land extract, often called the satbara. A 2008 state committee on farmer suicides and debt waiver said the 7/12 system itself was complicated, especially where undivided family holdings were still carried in one account. The committee noted that this caused repeated problems in dealing with banks and departments, and specifically said each farmer should be able to obtain a 7/12 extract in an individual name. That line is easy to miss, but it says a lot. The problem is not only rented land. It is also land cultivated by sons, brothers and widows whose names never reached mutation records.


That is why the off-record farmer is not a narrow category. It includes the oral tenancy leasing from a landowner who does not want the arrangement written down. It includes the son farming land that remains in his father’s name. It includes the widow farming land titled to her husband or in-laws.


Economist-based work on farmer-suicide data has stressed this for years. If title to land becomes the shortcut for identifying a farmer, a genuine cultivator can disappear from the count even when the village knows exactly what work he did.

In Vidarbha, that distinction between farming and being recognised as a farmer has been especially punishing. A field worker quoted by IndiaSpend put it plainly, “Most times, the land is in the name of the husband or family.” That one line captures the whole trap. The person carrying the labour, the debt and the crop loss may not be the person who exists on the document.



How a death falls out of the record


The second gap opens after the death itself. In the most documented cases, this shows up in farmer suicide records and ex gratia files.


Researchers have repeatedly found that a title-based test is often used, formally or informally, to decide whether a death belongs in the farmer category.


A widely cited analysis noted that a tenant farmer without title, a cultivator farming land held in his father’s name, or a woman cultivating land titled to her husband or father-in-law could all be denied the status of farmer.

Once that denial happens, the death can be reclassified, excluded from compensation, or vanish from the specific statistics that later guide farm policy.


Maharashtra’s own committee report laid out how stark that filter could be. It said that, initially, if the name of the person who died did not appear in the 7/12 record, the person was treated as ineligible for support. The report also published its own table on “documented” suicides and eligible cases.


In 2006, the state documented 1,447 farmer suicides, but only 577 were deemed eligible for support. In 2007, the eligibility share fell to 19 per cent. The report added that even some suicides that looked eligible were later marked ineligible because of disputes about proof, debt pressure or other reasons recorded by officials.


This is where paperwork stops being an administrative detail and becomes the gatekeeper of the official story. A later study on farm widows in Vidarbha found that informal agreements between brothers were common, land records were unclear, and in many cases the land was not registered in the deceased farmer’s name at all, but in his father’s name.


That made proving the deceased cultivator’s status difficult and complicated. The same report reproduced the qualifying rule for relief packages that required agricultural land to be in the name of the deceased farmer’s family. If the family was already struggling with an unclear title, undivided holdings or tenancy that had never been formalised, the burden of proof did not begin at zero. It began below zero.


The human cost of that rule appears in on-ground reporting again and again. A widow quoted in IndiaSpend summed up the experience in one sentence: “Rules prevented us from getting the help that we needed then.” That is the line where statistics and grief meet. The death may be known in the village. The debts may be known to lenders.

The crop failure may be known to neighbours. But if the name is missing from the recognised record, the death can still fail the state’s test.


What the numbers show and miss


The statistics themselves reveal both progress and blind spots. In its 2020 suicide tables, the National Crime Records Bureau classified “persons engaged in the farming sector” into farmers or cultivators and agricultural labourers.


It then split cultivators again into those cultivating their own land and those cultivating on leased land, on work lease, or on other people’s land under different local arrangements. That is a useful distinction on paper.


It shows that the counting system can recognise tenant cultivation where it becomes visible enough to be identified.


But the same table also shows how narrow that visibility remains. In 2020, the NCRB recorded 5,579 suicides among farmers or cultivators. Of these, 4,940 were in the own-land category and only 639 were in the leased-land or other-land category.

Set beside the scale of concealed tenancy described by the World Bank and NITI Aayog, that is a very small acknowledged figure. The most reasonable reading is not that tenant cultivation is tiny. It is documented that tenant cultivation is tiny. The data can count leased cultivation only when the lease or cultivation status is known, recorded, accepted and entered properly.


This is why the issue does not end with the suicide table itself. Once a tenant cultivator is missed there, the same documentary weakness tends to echo through every other policy layer. In Vidarbha, studies on widows of suicide-hit farm households found that ownership patterns were often stacked against the person left to prove entitlement.


In that survey, only 24.6 per cent said the land was in the deceased husband’s name, while 72.4 per cent said ownership sat with in-laws.


The same study found that 65 per cent of respondents had little information about property rights. A family dealing with death, debt and hostile inheritance claims is then expected to navigate mutation, succession and proof of cultivation at speed.


The architecture of current policy shows how quickly a missing entry spreads across schemes. In Andhra Pradesh, district agriculture authorities describe the Crop Cultivator Rights Card as the document that lets tenant farmers access crop loans, input subsidy, crop insurance, procurement and specific welfare schemes.


The same official page says the state’s e-Panta crop entry is the “single source of truth” for crop insurance, MSP procurement, input subsidy and crop loans. That phrase is important. If the record is the single source of truth, then the cultivator left outside that record is left outside several schemes at once.

A report from Telangana showed the same logic from another angle. It said a title-based insurance scheme recognised only those aged 18 to 59 with a land title in their own name, and for that reason excluded tenant farmers and some family members working on land still held in another relative’s name.


In other words, a counting problem and a benefit problem were operating on the same track. The cultivator without a recognised title did not just disappear from a table. He disappeared from the policy file built from that table.



What this does to farm policy


Bad counting does not stay inside statistics. It changes what farm policy claims to see, and what it chooses to fund.


It changes the compensation policy first. Relief packages, ex gratia norms and district verification processes are often built around documentary proof of farmer status, landholding and debt.

When tenant farmers and other off-record cultivators are filtered out early, the official number of affected families looks smaller than the real number. A government file may then show a manageable pool of eligible households, even when the distress in the village is wider and deeper.


It changes credit policy next. A legislative summary of the Reserve Bank of India’s review of agricultural credit noted that landless labourers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and oral lessees face difficulty in accessing institutional credit because of the absence of a proper land-leasing framework and lack of records.


The same summary also noted that reliance on non-institutional lenders remains linked to the lack of collateral security among tenant farmers and sharecroppers.


This matters because a policy system that understates the number of off-record cultivators will also understate the number of farm households locked into private borrowing.


It changes the insurance policy as well. If enrolment and claim systems are linked to land title or formally recognised cultivation, the resulting numbers can be misread. Low participation by tenant farmers may be treated as weak uptake or poor awareness, when the bigger issue is documentary exclusion.


The same distortion can affect input subsidy, procurement access and direct farm support. When documents become the gate, policy can mistake exclusion for absence.


It also changes how farmer distress is interpreted. If a death is marked as agricultural labour, or dropped from the farmer category altogether, the policy reading of the crisis shifts.


A high-tenancy district may then look like a place with fewer farmer deaths and more labour deaths, or fewer recognised agrarian deaths overall, even when the same debt, crop loss and lease burden sit behind many of those cases.

That affects which districts are tagged as hotspots, which groups are treated as the prime risk population, and which interventions are designed for owners rather than cultivators.


The most damaging effect is simpler than all of that. A state begins to know agriculture through ownership records more clearly than through cultivation itself. It can see the title holder more clearly than the person who took the lease, bought the seed, borrowed for inputs and faced the failed harvest.


Once policy is built on that view, the off-record tenant farmer does not disappear only from statistics. He disappears from the state’s working definition of who a farmer is.


FAQs


Q: Why are tenant farmer suicides not counted in India's official farmer suicide statistics

A: India's National Crime Records Bureau classifies a death as a farmer suicide only when the deceased's name appears on an official land title document. Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and those farming land under verbal or oral agreements are excluded from this classification because they hold no formal land ownership record. As a result, their deaths are typically recorded under categories such as "agricultural labourer" or, in the case of women, "housewife," making them statistically invisible in official farmer suicide data.


2. How does the absence of tenant farmers from land records affect government schemes like PM-KISAN and crop insurance in India?

A: Major agricultural welfare programmes in India, including PM-KISAN and the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), require land ownership documents to determine eligibility. Tenant farmers who do not hold land titles cannot access PM-KISAN's direct income transfers or enrol in crop insurance. Since these programmes are also sized and funded based on official data that undercounts tenant farmer deaths, the scale of relief consistently falls short of the actual population experiencing agrarian distress.

3. How many tenant farmers or landless agricultural families exist in India, and why is the number uncertain?

A: The National Statistical Office's 2019 Situation Assessment Survey estimated approximately 2.4 crore farming families working under leased land arrangements. The 2011 Socioeconomic and Caste Census put the number of landless agricultural families higher, at 5.37 crore. The uncertainty between these figures exists because most tenancy in India is informal and oral, driven by state laws that restrict or prohibit formal land leasing, meaning a large share of tenant arrangements never appears in any official database.



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About the Author

Pranay Arya is the founder and editor of The News Dirt, an independent journalism platform focused on ground-level reporting across Vidarbha. He has authored 800+ research-based articles covering public issues, regional history, infrastructure, governance, and socio-economic developments, building one of the region’s most extensive digital knowledge archives.

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