Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
With 17,972 suicides Maharashtra holds the dubious distinction of being the State with highest number of suicides in the country. The State share was 13.4 per cent of suicide cases reported in India during the year 2018.
The shocking information came to fore in a report of National Crime Record Bureau’s (NCRB) report which said that 134 of every one million of person living in Maharashtra ended their lives in a year due to various reasons. A total of 1,34,516 suicides were reported in the country during the year 2018, showing an increase of 0.3 per cent in comparison to year 2017. Rate of suicides has been calculated using projected population for the non-census years.
Each suicide is a personal tragedy that prematurely takes the life of an individual and has a continuing ripple effect, dramatically affecting the lives of families, friends and communities. Every year, more than one lakh people commit suicide in India leaving behind a trail of devastation that is hardly studied.
Majority of suicides were reported in Maharashtra (17,972) followed by 13,896 suicides in Tamil Nadu, 13,255 suicides in West Bengal, 11,775 suicides in Madhya Pradesh and 11,561 suicides in Karnataka accounting for 13.4 per cent, 10.3 per cent, 9.9 per cent, 8.8 per cent and 8.6 per cent of total suicides respectively. Incidentally, Maharashtra is leading state with urbanisation compared to other regions of the country and also leads in industrialisation.
These five States together account for 50.9 per cent of the total suicides reported in the country. The remaining 49.1 per cent suicides were reported in the remaining 24 States and seven union territories (UTs). Most populous country - Uttar Pradesh - has reported comparatively lower per centage share of suicidal deaths, accounting for only 3.6 per cent of the total suicides reported in the country.
Delhi, one of the most-populous UT, has reported the highest number of suicides (2,526) among UTs, followed by Puducherry (500). Seven UTs together accounted for 2.6 per cent of total suicides in the country. A total of 21,408 suicides were reported in the 53 mega cities of the country during the year 2018.
The States and UTs which have reported significant per centage increase in suicides in 2018 over 2017 are Arunachal Pradesh (48.3per cent), Chandigarh (41.6per cent), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (34.7per cent), Himachal Pradesh (28.5per cent), Uttarakhand (27.2per cent) and Manipur (20.9per cent) while highest per centage decrease was reported in Daman and Diu (14.6per cent), Puducherry (13.9per cent), Mizoram (13.2per cent), Sikkim (7.0per cent) and Goa (6.2per cent).
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