“There are two critical aspects regarding the NCRB data,” said Mishra, who has extensively worked on farmer suicides. “Firstly, the data at the aggregate level are underestimates. Secondly, the newly-created category of self-employed (agricultural labourer) would give the impression that this category was included in the earlier reporting, but this should not be the case for the simple reason that agricultural labourers are not self-employed. This also means that this category should not be there in the 2014 classification under self-employed. Thus, raising the question about who they really are.”
“We do have limitations in terms of collecting suicide data, as we completely rely on data collected from police stations in states,” said Akhilesh Kumar, NCRB's chief statistical officer. “There is not much we can do about it. For the 2014 report, we have tried to revise our proforma and include a little more detailed analysis on profession-wise suicides.”
In May, this correspondent witnessed how the complexity of the suicide-cause-compensation reporting cycle can skew data. In the backward Banda district of Uttar Pradesh's Bundelkhand region, I reported the story of a man who attempted suicide because he was not given compensation for two years over crop losses. He was stopped from killing himself by district officials, who promised compensation within three days. Within two days, he was handed a compensation cheque.
The problem was the man who attempted suicide did not appear to be a farmer, according to the district magistrate, who cleared the cheque. The man was apparently drunk when he attempted suicide, but given the publicity and political sensitivity around such incidents, the administration hastily handed over the money. In official data, the compensation has been paid, and a suicide attempt recorded.
Are suicides really declining as agriculture spirals into crisis?
This is unlikely. In general, farmer suicides are vastly under-reported, with many states–almost overnight–claiming no such incidents, what is called as a zero-reporting contagion.
“There has been an upward trend in cases of farmer suicides in Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Punjab recently, besides reporting of instances in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,” said a December 2014 Intelligence Bureau (IB) report, quoted in The Times of India, contradicting NCRB data.
There are three reasons for under-reporting:
First, a suicide by a farmer is classified as such only if the farmer's name is on the land title. That leaves out farmers whose land title is in their fathers' names, said Maitreesh Ghatak, a professor at the London School of Economics.
Second, female farmers are considered “farmer's wives” (by custom, land is almost never in their names). “This classification enables governments to exclude countless women farmer suicides”, said P. Sainath, Magsasay award winner who pioneered farm-suicide reporting in India. As IndiaSpend and Khabar Lahariya reported, there are about 36 million female farmers in India, and they are in crisis.
Third, some states–implausibly–report no farmer suicides, as the NCRB data note.
