Chhattisgarh, reported no suicides in 2011, four in 2012 and none in 2013, after reporting 4,701 in the three years before 2011. West Bengal, too, reported no farmer suicides in 2012, 2013 and 2014, after reporting 2,854 in the three years preceding 2012.
In 2014, Chhattisgarh reported 443 farmer suicides, the fourth highest among states.
However, Chhattisgarh's agriculture minister, Brijmohan Agarwal, called the NCRB data “misleading and based on a wrong analysis”. He said, according to this report in The Hindu : “These numbers are wrong, and there are no such incidents in Chhattisgarh.”
The zero-reporting contagion appears to have only spread, as the latest data released last week revealed.
Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Goa; all union territories, except Andaman and Nicobar Islands; and the northeastern states, except Assam, reported zero farmer suicides in 2014.
“Farmer-suicide reports are a malicious political campaign,” declared West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in 2012, the year the state reported no suicides.
Uttar Pradesh, the most-populous state, reported just 63 suicides in 2014, but the official data on farmer suicides is dodgy, as IndiaSpend reported.
What, then, are the real reasons for farmer suicides?
If, as the IB report noted, farmer suicides display an “upward trend”, and, as some experts suggest, the causes for these suicides go beyond indebtedness, why do farmers kill themselves?
Bankruptcy or indebtedness (20.6%), family problems (20.1%) and crop failure (16.8%) were the leading causes of farmer suicides in 2014, according to the NCRB.
However, attributing suicide to a single reason is too simplistic.
“Suicide is a complex process,” said Patel, the psychiatrist. “It arises out of an amalgamation of factors, hence, we cannot attribute a single reason for suicides.”
Indebtedness is indeed an issue, but crop failure isn't the only reason that leads to it, contrary to what media reporting and political reaction lead you to believe. Healthcare and education costs and personal expenditure (marriage costs, mostly) contribute significantly to a farmer's indebtedness.
Outstanding loans for health reasons have doubled from 3% in 2002 to 6% in 2012, according to data from the All India Debt and Investment Survey 2013, released earlier this month by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). The data further revealed that loans for farm business fell by about half over a decade, from 58% in 2002 to 29% in 2012.
The rise in borrowings for health reasons has become a significant factor in the lives of farmers because they lack savings, and government healthcare is substandard. So, farmers borrow to pay bills at private hospitals. More than half of India's rural population uses private healthcare, which is four times as costly as public healthcare, and can cost those in the poorest 20% more than 15 times their normal monthly expenditure, according to the latest NSSO data.
