Farmer suicides have always been a highly debated issue in the public discourse on agriculture sector performance in India. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 3,58,164 people engaged in the farming profession have committed suicide in India from 1995 to 2019. Though these numbers are of concern, the existing narratives on farmer suicides border predominantly on the sensational and ignore alternative viewpoints. To be specific, three significant gaps exist in our understanding of farmer suicides.
First, existing studies have analysed the intensity of farmer suicides in isolation, i.e. without comparing farmer suicides with those by other professionals. Second, all the current analyses assume that the NCRB database on Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India captures only suicides by farmers. The fact is this database includes suicides committed by both farmers/cultivators and agricultural labourers. As per NCRB definition, farmers are “those who cultivate on their own land as well as those who cultivate on leased land/other’s land with or without the assistance of agricultural labourers”. Agricultural labourers are those who “primarily work in the farming sector (agriculture/horticulture) whose main source of income is from agriculture labour activities”. Hence, the usage of the term “farmer suicides” is a misnomer. An appropriate word to describe the suicides of both farmers and agricultural labourers would be agrarian suicides.
Third, it would be misleading to compare agrarian suicides to those among other occupational groups using absolute numbers since a substantial part of the Indian workforce is involved in agriculture. A way out is to measure suicides on a per 1,00,000 people basis, called suicide rate. To calculate the agrarian suicide rate, the existing studies consider the working population within the agriculture sector in the denominator. However, for computing the suicide rate for the general population, they consider the entire population in the denominator instead of the working non-farming population. This amounts to comparing apples and oranges.
In the updated version of my recent work, I examine the intensity of agrarian suicides in India by addressing the gaps mentioned above in the previous analyses. The study covers a 25-year period from 1995 to 2019 and 17 major states, contributing to 98.53% of India’s agricultural Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP).The results are revealing.
Composition and growth: During 1995-2019, among the 12 professional categories covered in the NCRB database, suicides committed by housewives constituted the most significant proportion (19.05%) of the total reported in the study, followed by other self-employed persons (14.16%), persons engaged in other professions (15.92%) and persons involved in farming activities (12.53%). Thus, the farming profession was only the fourth largest contributor to the overall suicides committed in India. Those working in public sector undertakings (2.07%), government service (1.58%), and retired persons (0.79%) were least vulnerable to suicide since 1995.
More importantly, agrarian suicides recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -1.37% during 1995-2019. In contrast, suicide deaths among non-agricultural occupational groups taken together grew at 2.09% during the same period. The only other professional categories experiencing a negative CAGR in suicides are self-employed (others) (-4.18%) and government service (-1.14%). Suicides among “other” professions category grew at the highest rate of 3.52% between 1995 and 2019, followed by self-employed business activity (3.17%), students (2.90%), retired persons (1.55%), unemployed people (1.34%), and others.
One notable trend witnessed was the decline in the intensity of agrarian suicides since the mid-2000s. They declined sharply since 2005, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of total suicides. Between 1995 and 2004, it increased from 13.43% of total suicides to 16.30%. The same figure declined from 15.25% in 2005 to 7.61% in 2019. In sharp contrast, non-agrarian suicides have increased almost consistently since 1995. Interestingly, during the period of the sharp decline in agrarian suicides, the share of non-agrarian ones rose from 84.75% in 2005 to 92.39% in 2019. The growth rate of agrarian suicides also declined significantly from 6.39% in 1995–2002 to -3.82% in 2003–2019.
Suicide rate: An analysis of trends in suicide rates showed that the agrarian rate was much lower (ranging from 5.30 to 7.66 per 1,00,000 people) than the rate for the non-agrarian working population (ranging from 30.98 to 38.51) during the period from 1995 to 2011. In addition, since 2003, the agrarian suicide rate has declined almost continuously in contrast to an increase in the rate for the non-farming working population.
Another measure that provides a better assessment of the severity of agrarian suicides is the suicide mortality rate (SMR) ratio. It is the ratio of agrarian SMR to non-agrarian SMR. The former is computed as the ratio of agrarian suicides to the population of farmers and agricultural labourers. The latter is the ratio of suicides among non-farming professionals to the non-farming working population. Thus, the SMR ratio considers individuals who are engaged in both the farming and non-farming professions. Like the suicide rate, for the 17 states taken together, the SMR ratio has declined almost consistently since the mid-2000s.
A plausible cause for the decline in the intensity of agrarian suicides since the mid-2000s could be the improvement in the performance of India’s agrarian economy after 2003–04 compared to the “agrarian crisis” period from 1992-93 to 2002-03. The growth rate of agricultural GDP, food output, farm productivity, real farm income per cultivator, the profitability of the farm sector and total factor productivity improved after 2003–04. This could be attributed to a series of government policy initiatives implemented since 2003-04 to address the agriculture sector’s problems and challenges.
The above findings reveal that those engaged in the farming sector for livelihood are not the worst affected in terms of suicide death in India. Interestingly, the farming sector is one of the few occupational groups that witnessed negative growth in suicides over time. Therefore, the policy actors in India must refrain from sensationalising agrarian suicides, which can trigger “copycat” suicide attempts. Furthermore, dramatising agrarian suicides can also discourage educated and skilled youth workforce from taking up farming as a career by lowering their regard for the profession. Therefore, India needs a responsible reporting of and discussion on suicides in the farming sector.
Sthanu R Nair
Professor of Economics at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
(srn@iimk.ac.in)