It’s a pity that when asked about the outstanding farm debt across the country, the government resorted to seven-year-old numbers. According to the Situation Assessment Survey of 2019, quoted in Parliament on Tuesday, the average debt of agricultural households was ₹74,121—at a time when the average monthly income was a meagre ₹10,218. A slightly more recent assessment, carried out by the government-owned Nabard in 2021-22, shows that more than half of all agricultural households had loans averaging ₹91,231. The picture gets more worrying in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, where the share of indebted households crosses the three-fourths mark. What’s needed is an honest discourse on the financial distress of farmers, starting with a fresh survey to get an updated picture.