Data Journalism

Every 3 minutes a person died by suicide in India. Here’s what the NCRB 2022 data says.

According to National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2022, 170924 people died by suicide in India. This is equivalent of a single person dying around every three minutes for the whole year in 2022. Family problems and illnesses are the two major causes of suicides in India.

Last year I wrote the article on Suicides in India 2021. Recently, the Government of India published the 2022 data. With this article I hope that the authorities could make a data-driven decision on where to allocate resources to tackle this big social problem we have in front of us.

Incidence of Suicide in 2022

The incidence of suicide (number of deaths per 100K people) has increased this year again from 2021, however the rate of increment is falling down for the last two consecutive years. If one looks across the states of India, we see that some states of India have a very high incidence of suicide. The chart below shows the incidence rate for all the states of India. Sikkim, Kerala, Chhattisgarh had a high incidence in 2021 too.

If one looks at the total number of suicides, states with large populations are more likely to have a higher number of deaths. This is evident from the data too. The top five states with the highest number of suicidal deaths are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal.

If we look at the causes of suicides in these top five states, here’s what the data from 2022 says about the cause of suicide.

Except for West Bengal, where we do not know what the cause was, we see that family problems and illnesses are the two major drivers for suicides in these states. In all these states, one of the major drivers of suicides is Drug Abuse/Alcoholic Addiction. 98% of all the people dying by this cause were men. Except for West Bengal, it’s the third major driver of suicide in rest of the four states.

Percentage Variation in 2022 from 2021

Except for Manipur, all the states and union territories of India witnessed a higher number of suicides as compared to 2021. The highest increment has been in Lakshdweep, Mizoram, Uttar Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir all showing a more than 30% increment from 2021. If we look at the causes of suicides in these states, we see that Drug Abuse/Alcoholic Addiction is the cause of the largest number of deaths in Mizoram, whereas in Uttar Pradesh it’s family problems. For Jammu and Kashmir, we do not know the causes of suicides that causes the largest number of deaths. Family problems and illnesses are the second and third largest causes.

Variation in Causes

The highest change in 2022 over 2021 is seen in the category of suspected/illicit relationship, failure in examination, and AIDS/STD all with almost 25% increment over 2021. Conversely, the largest drop in the number of suicidal causes were in physical abuse, illegitimate pregnancy, and professional career problem as compared to 2021 data.

Causes of Suicides (All India) 2022

Family Problems are the biggest cause of suicides in 2022. Behind that are illnesses and drug abuse/alcoholic addiction. If we look at the country level, here are the leading cause of suicides in all the states of India.

1. Family Problems: Maharashtra: 6961, Tamil Nadu: 6820, Telangana: 5390, Kerala: 4789, Madhya Pradesh: 3905, Karnataka: 3779, Uttar Pradesh: 3134, Odisha: 3031, Andhra Pradesh: 2420, Gujarat: 2285, Rajasthan: 2186, Assam: 1284, Delhi (UT): 831, Tripura: 410, Himachal Pradesh: 325, Bihar: 308, Uttarakhand: 229, Chandigarh: 92, Meghalaya: 43, Manipur: 13, Lakshadweep: 2
2. Other Causes: West Bengal: 4088, Chhattisgarh: 2175, Puducherry: 198
3. Causes Not Known: Haryana: 1154, Jammu and Kashmir: 93, Nagaland: 21, Sikkim: 88, Arunachal Pradesh: 92
4. Illness: Punjab: 1096, Goa: 81, Andaman and Nicobar Islands: 82
5. Love Affairs: Jharkhand: 678, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu: 38
6. Drug Abuse/Alcoholic Addiction: Mizoram: 70
7. Professional/Career Problem: Ladakh: 4

Means Adopted for Suicide

Around 58% of the people died by hanging. Around 25% consumed poison. Similar to the the year 2021, more than 83% of the deaths in the country were caused by hanging and people consuming poison. Except for Telangana, all the states of India had highest number of deaths due to hanging.

Education Status

Almost two-third of the total people dying had an education less than Class 10th. This is also reflected in the income status of the people dying as there is generally a positive correlation between less education and less income. A staggering 64% of the people had an annual income of less than 100K rupees. This increases to almost 95% if we include people who had an income of less than 500K rupees. In other words, 95% of the people dying by suicide had an annual income of less than 500K rupees.

Almost 26% of the people drying were daily wage earners. If we include housewives in it, this becomes to slightly more than 41%. 6.7% of the people dying were farmers.

Mass Suicides

Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan had the highest number of mass suicides. Mass suicide is the term given to a term where all the members of a family die by suicide. Both the states had almost 72% of the mass suicides in the country.

Source: https://ncrb.gov.in/en/accidental-deaths-suicides-india-adsi