Coronavirus strikes India's rural areas, too

Indeed, "rural" grabbed a front-page headline in the print edition of the New York Times that landed in my driveway this morning, "Lockdown and Despair Sow Death in Rural India."  The headline in the online edition is, "'The Lockdown Killed My Father’: Farmer Suicides Add to India’s Virus Misery."  The lede for Karan Deep Singh's story follows:  

Randhir Singh was already deeply in debt when the coronavirus pandemic struck. Looking out at his paltry cotton field by the side of a railway track, he walked in circles, hopeless. In early May, he killed himself by lying on the same track. 

“This is what we feared,” said Rashpal Singh, Mr. Singh’s 22-year-old son, choking back tears in his family home in Sirsiwala, a small village in the northern Indian state of Punjab. “The lockdown killed my father.” 

Months ago, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed one of the world’s strictest lockdowns to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Singh’s livelihood came crashing down. His one-acre farm had barely produced enough cotton to cover the cost of growing it, and the lockdown even robbed him of his side job as a bus driver. 

India now leads the world in new daily reported coronavirus cases and has the second-highest number of cases globally, surpassing Brazil on Monday. In Punjab, where cases have surged, lockdowns have been imposed all over again. The measures, economists say, are forcing millions of households into poverty and contributing to a long-running tragedy: farmer suicides.

Earlier posts about farmer suicides, long before the pandemic, are here (2014, Andra Pradesh) and here (including Australia, China, and Iowa, USA).