Modi govt’s flawed economic policies driving people to suicide, but it remains as apathetic as ever

Unemployment in India has been a serious issue since November 2016, when the Modi government announced demonetization which immediately resulted in millions of the workforce becoming jobless due to shutting down of innumerable enterprises and scaling down of production.

By early 2018, it reached a 45 year high, and now is highest in five decades. What is most disturbing is that joblessness is increasingly driving people to suicide with the country witnessing the highest number of suicides among the unemployed in 2020, which happened to be the first year of the COVID-19 crisis.

Access to further government records of suicide is not available, but one can easily find news reports regarding suicides due to joblessness, and the situation is alarming.

However, the question is if it is of any concern to the Modi government, which seems to be in a state of slumber in spite of being aware of the situation as revealed in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday by Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai.

Rai’s written reply shocked the nation after he disclosed National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for the year 2020 that 3,548 people died by suicide due to unemployment in 2020. The total number of suicides that year was 1.53 lakh, up from 1.39 lakh in 2019.

It may not be out of place to mention here that 2020 was the year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the people of the country beat utensils and light lamps to drive Corona away, before giving just four hours’ notice of a nationwide lockdown, bringing the whole economy to a grinding halt.

We had then witnessed widespread chaos and the heart-rending exodus of migrant workers to their homes on foot along with frail women and children, without food and with no hope of finding any on the way due to the lockdown. Many of them simply perished, but the Union government said in Parliament that it doesn’t have records of their deaths when it came to the issue of grant of compensation to their kin.

However, the Union government can’t deny knowledge of suicides due to joblessness. Presently, it is trying to shift blame for the suicides on COVID-19. But on whom will they shift the blame for increasing suicides before the pandemic struck the country?

NCRB data reveals that suicides due to unemployment have been increasing over the last few years, ever since Modi government took the reins of the country in 2014, the year when 2,207 suicides were recorded. In 2015 the figure rose to 2,723 and dropped to 2,298 in 2016 which was still higher than the 2014 level.

However, after 2016, it has been steadily rising. In 2017, the number of persons who died by suicide due to unemployment rose to 2,404, which increased to 2,741 in 2018 and 2,851 in 2019.

By 2020, the five states most prone to suicides due to unemployment were Karnataka with 720 suicides, followed by Maharashtra with 625, Tamil Nadu with 336, Assam with 234, and Uttar Pradesh with 227.

Apart from unemployment as a cause of suicides, bankruptcy or indebtedness are the top associated causes. In his reply, Nityanand Rai said that between 2018 and 2020, 16,091 people died by suicide due to bankruptcy or indebtedness. In 2018, much before the pandemic struck the country, a total of 4,970 people died by suicide due to bankruptcy and indebtedness while in 2019 the figure rose to 5,908.

In 2020, a total of 5,213 people died by suicide, less than in the previous year, which proves that putting the blame on COVID-19 is not totally correct.

Quite clearly, it is the Modi government’s policies which are to blame for this unfortunate phenomenon.

It should have deployed a multipronged strategy to deal with the issue of unemployment, which is the highest in the past 50 years, as Rahul Gandhi rightly pointed in the Lok Sabha during the Budget Session 2022.

But it failed to have any provisions to address the issue in Budget 2022-23 even as Rai claimed that the government is running a number of programmes aiming at employment generation and stress management for preventing suicides. If so, they are obviously ineffective on the ground.

Is it too much to expect the Modi govt to wake up to the reality?

(IPA Service)

Views are personal