India's 'Epidemic' of Farmer Suicides

"An epidemic is sweeping through the Indian countryside, killing farmers by the hundreds in the nation's vast, sun-baked heartland. What afflicts them is not disease or famine but despair, so deep that it is driving men...to take their lives at the rate of two a day...Fueled by crushing debt, failing crops and government indifference, the suicides are a stark reminder of the desperate poverty that continues to engulf huge swaths of this nation of 1 billion, despite the enthusiastic portrayals of India at home and abroad as a software powerhouse, an outsourcing giant and an economic juggernaut with growth of 8% a year."