January 11th, 2020 / 12:07 PM
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According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data on accidental deaths and suicides, 10,349 farmers and agricultural labourers committed suicide in 2018.
The NCRB data on farmer suicides for 2017 was still not disclosed in the report released on Wednesday, January 8. The NCRB data of 2017 had no mention of farmer suicide numbers.
The farmer suicides for 2018 have marginally dipped from the 11,379 cases recorded in 2016, but the suicide rate in the agriculture sector accounted for 7.7 per cent of the total 134,516 suicides in the country.
“Out of 5,763 farmer/cultivator suicides, a total of 5,457 were male and 306 were female during 2018. Out of 4,586 suicides committed by agricultural labourers during 2018, 4,071 were male and 515 were female,” the report stated.
Many states and union territories have reported zero suicides by farmers, cultivators, and farm labourers. “West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Goa, Chandigarh, Daman & Diu, Delhi, Lakshadweep and Puducherry reported zero suicides of farmers/cultivators as well as agricultural labourers”, NCRB reported.
As per the report, the most number of suicides were reported in Maharashtra (17,972) followed by Tamil Nadu (13,896), West Bengal (13,255), Madhya Pradesh (11,775) and Karnataka (11,561), accounting for 13.4, 10.3, 9.9, 8.8 and 8.6 per cent of the total, respectively.
Overall, a total of 1,34,516 suicides were reported in the country in 2018, an increase of 3.6 per cent in comparison to 2017 when 1,29,887 people ended their lives.
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Contributors
Written by : Sanika Athavale
Edited by : Shubhendu Deshmukh