Padmavati Reddy, widowed at 25, with her son, Arun Kumar, nine, and daughter Jyotsna, five. Their father, Anji, facing huge debts, hanged himself from a drumstick tree in his field in the village of Mallareddey Pelly, 70km outside Hyderabad, on 7 December 2004. Photograph: Christian Aid/Richard Smith
To mark Christian Aid week, the charity has released a shocking report blaming, among others, the Department for International Development for an epidemic of suicides among Indian farmers.
More than 4,000 farmers have killed themselves in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Christian Aid claim, since a policy of liberalisation and privatisation - backed by DfID and the Adam Smith Institute - was introduced in 1998. A total of 2,115 of those were in 2004 alone - a rate of more than 40 a week.
The reason, the charity says, is a "zealous programme of liberalisation and privatisation" by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, with active support from DfiD. This led to spiralling debts, not helped by 45,000 public sector workers losing their jobs at the same time under a privatisation scheme.
Christian Aid's director Dr Daleep Mukarji said: "It is a scandal that the British government has backed policies and pumped British taxpayers' money into schemes which have contributed to poor Indian farmers killing themselves and Indian workers being laid off in huge numbers."
Britain's minister for international development, Gareth Thomas, said the report was out of date. "Christian Aid seems to be behind the times, because our aid isn't tied to conditions such as privatisation."
The report comes in the wake of comments from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, last month, who criticised "a naive faith in the free market" in a sermon to mark Christian Aid's 60th anniversary.
