India’s suicide problem

Government response to the crisis of farmer suicides has been simplistic. Instead of special packages, it should offer improved access to healthcare.

For over a decade, farmer suicides in India has been a serious public policy concern. More recently, this has led to a shrill media outcry and much politicking. The government response to the crisis of farmer suicide has mostly been simplistic and sometimes aggravating. The main issue with offering “special packages” to deal with such a problem is that it is reactionary rather than preemptive long-term policy. Suicides are characterised by a prior history of difficulties and, in most cases, mental illness that renders the person vulnerable to suicidal behaviour, for which we need to have a deeper understanding of factors that trigger and contribute to suicides among different demographic categories. We study the data from the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) of India and disaggregate across demographics and leading causes of suicides. We examine existing data on the suicide mortality rate (SMR), defined as the number of suicides reported per 1,00,000 population for categories such as farmers, housewives and students. We begin with farmer suicides and the state of Maharashtra, which had the largest number of farmer suicides for decades. We find that 76 per cent of all suicides there are concentrated within six districts, and nearly 60 per cent of the farmers who committed suicide own more than four acres of land. Indebtedness has been highlighted as the prime cause and leading public intellectuals have called for an end to the “debt deaths”. The National Sample Survey data suggests that the debt burden, measured as the debt-to-asset ratio, declines with increase in asset-holding. So poorer households have a higher debt burden. This is true for both institutional and non-institutional debt. However, the suicide data reported by the state government indicates that the incidence of suicide is much higher for households with larger land holdings. Nearly 86 per cent of all farmer suicides in Maharashtra are committed by those with more than two acres of land. Compare the two most farmer-suicide-prone states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh with two of the most backward states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Data for farmer SMR reveals that over the last two decades, Andhra and Maharashtra have had very high and significantly rising numbers of suicides. Farmer suicide rates in Bihar and UP have been consistently low over that period. However, there are no obvious reasons to believe that farmer distress is lower in Bihar and UP. Remarkably, even if we look at the number of suicides for categories of professions unrelated to farming, like government and private services or students, Andhra and Maharashtra -