The blind spot every Indian is guilty of. Including you

12,500 Indian farmers committed suicide last year – and, as Shoma said when she took the stage to introduce our first speaker on this evening – it didn’t make us blink.

If 12,500 journalists, or bankers, or lawyers had killed themselves, the world would have ground to a halt.

And that’s why the staggering, invisible crisis of India’s farmers was what we took on at Algebra, with provocative trade and food policy analyst Devinder Sharma.

In a conversation bookended with shock figures, what mattered was not individual stories, however heartrending – or individual prescriptions, however pathbreaking.

It was the need to recognise that we have collectively institutionalised the failure of a domain that engages 800 million Indians – through privileging industry over agriculture; through a myopic economic framework of contribution to GDP; through disdaining the very hand that feeds us.

And the need to recognise that traditional economic models may be at their end of solutions to make farming sustainable, but unless we engage our collective imagination to do so, we will have not just a food crisis, but the reality of 800 million Indians with no jobs.

These are not conversations for one evening, or one speaker – and we’ll keep coming back to it from different perspectives over the year – but to gain incredible insight into this collective blind spot, watch the full session above.