Statistics : Statutory Warning

A few days back I received an anguished tweet suggesting that every half an hour, an Indian farmer committed suicide.

Sounds terrible, right? You are almost forced to do the mental maths. One every half hour makes it two an hour. Times 24 gives you 48. A week will count 336 dead. And so on all the way up to 17520 every year. Seventeen thousand... India's killing fields. More evidence of the cold brutality that is the grim subtext of our growth story, you tell yourself.

Wait it a minute. Something isn't right here.

Investigate this a bit, you tell yourself. So you decide to look up Wikipedia. India's suicide incidence at the national level is 10.3 per 100,000 population. That's more than 100 per million. For a country now totted up at 1200 million souls, there are over 120,000 suicides a year. Of which about 17,500 are farmer suicides. So back to Wikipedia where you discover that 52% of our population is still employed in Agriculture. Make a simplifying assumption about the family size being no more than the national average and that would put 52% of India's population in agriculture dependent families.

Now if suicides are distributed secularly across the population, 52% of the population should account for 52% of the suicides, right? That would translate into... 62,400 suicides. But the actual figure is less than a third of that. Conversely, non agricultural suicides, 102,000 give or take, out of a non agricultural population of 576 million give you a suicide incidence of 17.7 per 100,000. And 17,500 suicides out of the agricultural population of 624 million gives a suicide incidence of 2.8 per 100,000. You, my dear urban, non agricultural Indian reader are SIX TIMES MORE LIKELY TO COMMIT SUICIDE than your agricultural sister, or brother.

I hasten to add that suicides may well be concentrated in a particular geography and Vidarbha may have a much larger suicide incidence than even the non agricultural average. Every suicide is a tragedy and I am not about to belittle a life lost to fatal desperation.