New Delhi: A 38-year-old farmer from Punjab was found dead at a protest site near the Tikri border Thursday morning, police said. The deceased has been identified as Jai Singh, a resident of Tungwali village in Bathinda district. He and his brother had been part of the farmers’ protest at the Haryana-Delhi border against the Centre’s three farm laws. Jai Singh had been a part of the protests for more than a week, according to Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan) leader Shingara Singh.
Jai was found dead in the morning. The exact cause of the death can be ascertained after a post-mortem, an official of the Bahadurgarh police in Haryana said. Jai’s brother suspected that he might have died of heart attack. The body was sent to the Bahadurgarh civil hospital in Jhajjar district, the official said.
Shingara demanded a compensation of Rs 10 lakh and a government job for the kin of the deceased.
Around 20 farmers, many of them are from Punjab, have so far died during the protests. They have either died of natural causes or in road accidents, the BKU leader said.
Meanwhile in a separate development widows of farmers who have died by suicide have also joined the points.
Among them was a 56-year-old woman whose farmer husband died by suicide five years ago. Then there was a 70-year-old who lost her daughter-in-law, the sole earner of the family, a decade ago. Also the 60-year-old mother whose son consumed poison in 2010 joined the protests at the Tikri border Wednesday.
Jasbeer Kaur, 56 is a farmer from Kakarwal village of Sangrur district of Punjab. She said her husband ended his life in 2015 after he failed to repay his farm debts. “Our lives had stopped the very day. We just have not been able to overcome the loss. Things got worse after my husband died. My son is working in someone else’s farmland and we had to sell the two-acre land we had. I still have to repay a loan of Rs 4,00,000 lakh,” she said.
Holding photographs of their loved ones, the women were seen raising slogans against the new farm laws at the Tikri border on a separate stage set up by BKU.
Hardeep Kaur, 70, a farmer from Ugrahan, said her daughter-in-law died by suicide a decade ago after she was trapped in farm debts. “She was the only earning member of our family. Both my husband and my son are bedridden. We had Rs 6,00,000 debt at that time and the produce from our less than two-acre land was not enough to repay that. The debt is still there and we have no means of repaying it,” informed Hardeep.
The women said they had decided to join the stir at Delhi’s borders because the three new farm laws will ‘lead to more farmers ending their lives’.
It should be stated here that a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) report has said that a total of 10,281 agriculturists (5,957 cultivators and 4,324 farm labourers) died by suicide in 2019.
