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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Droughts, floods, and suicides: What Bihar can teach Maharashtra and other states -Sanjiv Phansalkar

Droughts, floods, and suicides: What Bihar can teach Maharashtra and other states -Sanjiv Phansalkar

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published Published on Mar 31, 2017   modified Modified on Mar 31, 2017
-VillageSquare.in

A deeper dive is needed to draw insights from the low prevalence of farmer suicides in Bihar than in more developed regions of India such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh

Suicide is among the most important antecedents of death in India, perhaps equaling, if not exceeding, road accidents. The better-developed and governed states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh show a higher incidence of suicides (number of suicides per 100,000 population) than the relatively backward states. Bihar, for instance, shows a suicide rate that is under 1 per 100,000 of the population.

The past two decades have shown a spurt in suicides among farm families. This started becoming a public issue with the rise of suicides in Telangana, spreading through Vidarbha, Punjab, and Karnataka. The latest leader in the morbid race has been the Marathwada region in Maharashtra. The Beed district in Marathwada alone has reported over a thousand suicides in the last two years.

Acute distress

There have been numerous analyses of the suicide phenomenon through scholarly writing, particularly of farm suicides. Suicides are said to be a result of acute distress. In most cases of young suicides, such distress arises out of failure (in exams, in romantic affairs, in marriages or at post-partum stage in a woman’s life). While some may be manslaughters cunningly made to look like suicide, most of these deaths occur as a result of rash fatal acts taken in an emotional frenzy.

Suicides among older people are said to arise out of uncontrolled stress arising out of the secular trend of events in personal life. Farm distress-led suicides often said to be resulting from unmanageable debt burden, are in the second category. Of the total suicide figures, those associated with farm distress are in a minority, but they attract far more media attention as they can be sensationally ascribed to the presumed failure of government policies and programs.

Comparing regions

It is interesting as well as instructive to compare the regions, which show a similar if not worse level of objective adversity with these regions reporting high levels of farm distress-led suicides. It can perhaps indicate possible ways of controlling the avoidable loss of life. Hence we take a look at flood-prone areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Assam and compare them with regions such as Telangana, Vidarbha, and Marathwada.

North Bihar is perhaps a basket case of a flood-prone area. Population density in flood-prone Bihar regions is at least three times that in the drought-prone regions. In 2011, Madhubani had a population density exceeding 1200 persons per sq. km compared with a population density varying between 200 and 350 for these drought-prone regions. Population density figures are — Beed (242), Jalna (200), Yeotmal (209), Wardha (210), Karimnagar (322) and Gulbarga (204).

As a consequence, farmland in flood plains tends to be much smaller, running for an average family in less than half an acre, compared to 7-8 acres in the dry areas. While the dry areas suffer periodic droughts, complete crop failures are rare. For the flood plains, not only complete crop failures but also the loss of the very land, habitation and animals, is not uncommon. It is thus not possible to argue that the adversity experienced by Bihar’s flood-prone areas is in any sense smaller than that of the dry lands.

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VillageSquare.in, 29 March, 2017, http://www.villagesquare.in/2017/03/29/droughts-floods-suicides-bihar-can-teach-maharashtra-states/


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