Context: Recently, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released the Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India Report 2020.
Suicide Categories

• The report divides suicides into nine categories — apart from daily wagers, housewives and people working in the farm sector, the deaths are listed under ‘professionals/salaried persons’, ‘students’, ‘self-employed persons’, ‘retired persons’, and ‘others’.

Key Points

• The number of agricultural labourers who died by suicide in 2020 was 18% higher than the previous year.
• Overall, 10,677 people engaged in the farm sector died by suicide in 2020.
• However, suicides among landowning farmers dropped slightly during the pandemic year.
• Landless agricultural labourers, who did not benefit from income support schemes such as PM Kisan, may have faced higher levels of distress during the pandemic.
• The worst among the States continues to be Maharashtra, with 4,006 suicides in the farm sector, including a 15% increase in farm worker suicides.
• Other States with a poor record include Karnataka (2016), Andhra Pradesh (889) and Madhya Pradesh (735). Karnataka saw a dismal 43% increase in the number of farm worker suicides in 2020.

Causes of Farmers Suicides

• There is no consensus on what the main causes might be but studies show suicide victims are motivated by more than one cause however the primer reasons being the inability to repay loans.
• Major causes reportedly are bankruptcy/indebtedness, problems in the families, crop failure, illness and alcohol/substance abuse.
• Disguised unemployment on farms remains high. Fragmentation of land holdings has left far too many farmers with farms that are too small to be remunerative.
• Low access to credit, irrigation and technology worsens their ability to make a comfortable living. A tenth of our farmers are landless.
• They use rented land, but the inadequacies of land-leasing mechanisms make it difficult for them to raise production.
• Most of the suicides have occurred in areas of cash crops like cotton and sugarcane, which is high input, high output gambling, not based on the principle of sustained and resilient high yield

Cause-Wise Analysis
Among causes of suicide that make up at least a percent of such deaths

• Poverty and unemployment registered the biggest increase.
• Drug abuse or alcohol addiction, illness, and family problems come next.
• Although students have registered an increase in deaths by suicide it was likely related to relatively longer-term prospects (perhaps inability to continue education) than exams.

Challenges ahead

• Irrigation reaches less than half of India’s overall farmland, a picture that has not changed much over the past decade, and more than 60% of our farmers are susceptible to rainfall anomalies.
• Rain-fed farming yields are typically less than half those of irrigated farmland.
• Though India has caught up with global levels of fertilizer use, this is neither efficient nor environmentally sustainable. Both add to the cost of cultivation.
• Research on high-yielding crops has plateaued after an initial burst during the Green Revolution and farmers have to resort to patented seeds to draw more out of their scanty acres.
• Initiatives like the eNAM are helping integrate the farmers’ produce directly with the market, however, cutting the role of intermediaries is still lagging behind.

 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)

• The NCRB is an Indian government agency responsible for collecting and analysing crime data as defined by the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Special and Local Laws (SLL).
• It is headquartered in New Delhi and is part of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
• It was set-up in 1986 to function as a repository of information on crime and criminals so as to assist the investigators in linking crime to the perpetrators.
• It was set up based on the recommendation of the Task force, 1985 and National Police Commission, 197.
• It merged the Directorate of Coordination and Police Computer (DCPC), Inter State Criminals Data Branch of CBI and Central Finger Print Bureau of CBI