Suicides by farmers drop 2.1% in 2022, farm labourers rise by 9.3%

This effectively means that in the last three years, while suicides by those who show farming as their profession have consistently declined, those who show as farm labourers have risen

Farmer suicides dropped 2.1 per cent and suicides by those engaged as farm labourers rose 9.3 per cent in 2022 as compared to 2021, according to data from the newly released Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India report for 2022.
 

As many as 11,290 people related to farming in some way or the other died by suicide in 2022. The number was 10,881 in 2021. In 2020, around 5,579 farmers had committed suicide while the corresponding number for farm labourers was 5,098.
 

This effectively means that in the last three years while suicides by those who show farming as their profession has consistently declined, suicides by farm labourers have risen.

 

This, some economists say, could be reflective of the distress among those at the bottom of the pyramid as real rural wages have remained almost stagnant.
 

However, official documentation attributes suicides to a variety of reasons that includes family trouble and indebtedness.
 

Data from the Situational Assessment Survey (SAS) of the National Statistical Office for 2018-19 showed that incomes from crop production had dropped to 37.7 per cent from 47.9 per cent in 2012-13, while income from wages had risen from 32.2 per cent to 40.3 per cent — thus becoming one of the main sources of income for an agricultural household.
 

A similar trend was also seen in the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development’s Financial Inclusion Survey of 2015-16.

The SAS survey also showed that the number of farming households rose from 90 million to 93 million in six years (between 2012-13 and 2018-19), while the number of families not engaged in farming rose from 66 million to nearly 80 million.
 

The two data sets (though both have different timelines) point towards a trend, which shows that while wages have predominantly become the main source of income of an average farming household in the country, if it does not rise adequately, distress tends to creep, experts said.