WS MoreOrLess: Indian Farmer Suicides
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander. This week we look at whether there's an epidemic of suicides among farmers in India.
Did someone claim 'several million' Indian farmers committed suicide — what was the original claim?
A listener, Mark, has drawn our attention to a claim made about the number of such deaths during a debate about food prices on the BBC.
Several million farmers have committed suicide in India in the past few years because they couldn't make a living. Now, I would like for you to go. I would like for you to go to the widows and say to them, should prices have been higher or lower?
But have several million farmers in India really killed themselves in recent years? Mark finds it hard to believe. This is desperately tragic, however many it applies to, he says, but it seems out by an order of magnitude, even for a country with more than a billion people and a high proportion of farmers. The number of farmers killing themselves in India has received huge attention worldwide over the past few years and a lot of resources have been ploughed into tackling the problem. But is everyone joining in the debate quite sure of their numbers? Mark, we shared your suspicions and we got Wesley Stevenson investigating.
How did we verify Jim Rogers' memory of '2.5 million' farmer suicides?
Hi Ruth. Yes, to check this out, first of all we contacted Jim Rogers, an influential investor who you heard talking earlier. Now what precise data was he referring to when he said millions had died in recent years? Well he said the statistic as he remembers it is officially two and a half million in the last 15 years or so.
So that's as he remembers the official figures, but you've actually looked at them Wes?
Yes, and he's actually out by a factor of 10. The official figures show that since 1995, which, as far as I can tell, is an arbitrary starting point, since 1995 there have been 270,000 suicides among farmers in India.
So Jim Rogers is out by a factor of 10. That's a really large amount.
What do official Indian statistics actually report about farmer suicides since 1995?
Why do you think that is?
Well, I think the reason is, is because he's probably mistaken a lakh for a million. Because in South Asia, they don't use millions, they use lakhs. And one lakh is 100,000. And in print, it's written in a way that could cause you to confuse the two.
We'll come back to that later. So Jim Rogers was out by a factor of 10. But how reliable are the official statistics? I mean, maybe they don't capture the whole story themselves.
Well, no, they probably don't. A huge study of suicides in India, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet last July, found a problem with these official figures. Professor Prabhat Jha is the director of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto in Canada and is one of the authors.
The official statistics in India, including those for farmers, rely on basically what are police reports of suicide. And what we noted there is that up to a quarter of the suicides are underreported.
How reliable are police suicide reports and could underreporting change the total?
And the reason is obvious, that suicide is a taboo subject. But when we send survey teams to the household and they know the survey teams, they're much more likely to report a suicide.
So Prabhat Jha estimates the official number of suicides among farmers is 25% lower than the real figure. And although we're not, as it turns out, talking about millions of deaths, we are talking about hundreds of thousands. And that still sounds like a lot of people.
Yes, and campaign groups who think food speculators and GM crop companies are causing farmers to get into financial difficulties would like you to think this is a big number. But? But the one thing that's missing in any of this is context. Let's just take one year, 2010. According to Professor Jha's estimates, there were 19,000 suicides by agricultural workers, which is clearly 19,000 too many. But I asked Professor Jha how this compares to other areas of Indian life.
So if we think, even if there's some underreporting, we estimate in 2010 close to 190,000 suicides. So of all the suicides occurring in India, that would suggest it's only about 10% of all of the suicides are actually in farmers.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:24
2
Did someone claim 'several million' Indian farmers committed suicide — what was the original claim?
0:24–1:24
3
How did we verify Jim Rogers' memory of '2.5 million' farmer suicides?
1:24–2:07
4
What do official Indian statistics actually report about farmer suicides since 1995?
2:07–3:02
5
How reliable are police suicide reports and could underreporting change the total?
3:02–4:54
6
Are farmer suicide rates higher than other groups once you account for population share?
4:54–6:30
7
How can confusing South Asian number terms like 'lakh' and 'crore' lead to 10x errors?
6:30–7:54
8
Where do the terms 'lakh' and 'crore' come from and how did they develop historically?
7:54–9:26