The release of the Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2023 report provided a very depressing but familiar set of statistics, another year of increasing suicides! A total of 1, 72, 451 suicides were reported in that period across India, representing a 4.2% increase from the previous year, and also the highest level of suicides reported since the NCRB began collecting this kind of data. Behind those numbers lie the story deeper social fissures, poverty, gendered subordination, caste humiliation, unemployment, and the unseen crisis of mental health, which the Bureau’s descriptive language fails to account for.
According to the NCRB, suicide remains most prevalent among daily wage earners, housewives, and students. These descriptions are not only about occupational status, but reflections on India’s social hierarchies. The “daily wage earner,” who made up 26.4% of all suicide victims in 2023, is the precarious worker, buried in debt, inflation, and insecure employment. The “housewife,” at nearly 14.7%, is a symbol for unpaid domestic labour under patriarchal control and social isolation. The “student,” accounting for 8.5% of total suicides, demonstrates the systemic public and private failure to provide a humane education and mental health support. For the NCRB, these are merely descriptive occupational categories, yet they carry moral and political significance; they are indicators of whose despair is acknowledged and whose is not.
Numbers without Context
The NCRB identifies “family problems” (32%) and “illness” (18%) as primary contributors to suicide. This seems simple on paper – family dysfunction and health issues. However, these classifications conceal more than they disclose. What the Bureau calls “family problems” may include domestically violent behaviour, dowry harassment, or control related to one’s gender. “Illness” likely includes untreated depression among other illnesses, stigma related to disability, and traumatic, life-changing events. Then, stripped of the structural analysis, we easily convert the collective suffering to private pathology in the data.
There is no clearer example of this than student suicides. In 2023, India reported 13,044 student suicides, or about 36 a day, with Maharashtra (2,578) and Tamil Nadu (1,982) having the highest number, followed by Madhya Pradesh (1,668). These states have the largest educational ecosystems, or competition for schools, outside of state-controlled educational ecosystems. Similar patterns recur beneath the statistics: students migrating from rural to urban centres; that caste-based discrimination continues as students are excluded to elite institutions in various ways, if they are even included; and pressures from family about economics that bar a young person’s choice to attend school prevent their abilities to enjoy school, carry their anxieties into learning spaces when they keep “school pressures” from family. The NCRB does not ask whether “academic pressure” is systemically tilted “equal” – it is not.
In February 2024, the Supreme Court released its comprehensive Guidelines on the Mental Health of Students, citing what it referred to as an “epidemic of psychological distress” on campuses across India. The Court called upon universities and colleges to create counselling cells, train faculty to identify early indicators of distress, and implement systems that can protect students from discrimination that may take place on the basis of caste, gender, or the socio-economic status of their family of origin. These Guidelines were developed as an extension of the Court’s findings in Sukdeb Saha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (2024), in which it explained that the State has a “positive constitutional obligation” under Articles 21 and 21A to ensure mental well-being in educational and workplace environments. A detailed summary done by CHMLP can be read here. In that case, the Court condemned the State’s failure to create a coherent national framework for the prevention of student suicides, in particular to direct the states to view student suicide as a consequence of policy failure rather than a private tragedy.
These pronouncements reaffirm a simple truth that the NCRB’s data failed to reveal: student suicides are not individual personal crises but expressions of collective neglect, of caste hierarchy, and of inadequate mental health infrastructure. Nonetheless, and despite these judicial interventions, implementation remains inconsistent, as most such institutions continue to treat mental health services as optional, rather than as the institutional responsibility they need to understand it as.
The Silence around Farmer Suicides and those of Workers
The way the NCRB handles farmer suicides chillingly captures the politics of omission. In 2023, 12,567 farmers and agricultural labourers died by suicide — a 5% increase from 2022. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh made up over 60% of these suicides. Yet again, for every year, the report does not discuss structural causes: falling crop prices, shocks due to climate change, debt, and neglect in policy.
Organisations from civil society, such as the All India Kisan Sabha and P. Sainath’s People’s Archive of Rural India, have documented hundreds of farmer suicides that are absent from the NCRB report. Many suicides are coded under “other professions” or not included at all due to technical reasons of land ownership. Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and women farmers who do the vast majority of agricultural work are missing. The NCRB’s silence about these deaths is a political act that removes the agrarian crisis from public consciousness by rendering structural violence into an absence in administrative categories.
In a similar vein, the cadre of “daily wage earners” has increased dramatically in the last five years, subsuming what was a more distinct representation of labour distress. It now includes construction workers, gig workers, sanitation workers, and small artisans who are all trapped in elements of insecurity. That nearly one in four people who commit suicide in India are daily wage earners, should not be an observation of a statistical trend, but a reproach of an economy that cares more for productivity than for people.
The Unseen Intersections of Caste, Gender, and Mental Health
By refusing to break suicide data down by caste identity, the NCRB obscures an understanding of mental distress in terms of social humiliation and exclusion. For instance, the case of Darshan Solanki, a student at IIT Bombay, who died by suicide in 2023, was widely identified in news reports as a death resulting from caste discrimination, but it would not be categorized under anything official. Likewise, the suicides of Dalit and Adivasi students across medical and technical institutions in India, who endure daily micro-aggressions from their peer groups in the form of “competition,”, also go undocumented in suicides that become of relevance to national statistics.
Gender issues exacerbate susceptibility. The relation between domestic violence, demands for dowry, and emotional abuse remains the most consistent factor for women in suicide. Yet, the label “housewife” that the NCRB has categorized those women under is a clear indication of biased and patriarchal categorization that sits below the level of humanity when suffering is reduced to a bureaucratic category. By neglecting to label intimate partner violence and coercion within marriage as a cause, the Bureau also erases the structural violence that is encountered in everyday life.
Despite the passage of the Mental Healthcare Act of 2017, mental health continues to be an undercurrent in policy and also data collected for the report. Governments allocate less than 1% of total health spending to mental health for community mental health services, which should be alarming. The NCRB noted “mental illness” as a cause for suicide in only 4.1% of suicides recorded in the annual report, and experts recognize this figure is severely understated. What this illustrates is not a rethinking of resilience, but denial. The state can measure death, rather than despair.
Disappearing the Crisis
Data manipulation encompasses not only the omission of unpleasant cases but also the reclassification of data. In 2023, several states, including Maharashtra and Telangana, reported a decline in farmer suicides due to “better welfare delivery,” although independent reports indicated a mostly correspondingly higher number. Similarly, the circumstances leading to a decline in cybercrime in Mumbai were simply reclassified to generate an 11.7% decrease in cybercrime. Suicides are often reclassified into other occupations or left unqualified to further the claims of administrative success.
The sanitization of statistics is part of a larger pattern: the act of withholding documentation to showcase progress. In Jammu & Kashmir, in 2023, the NCRB reported zero counts of communal violence and non-sedition prosecutions, while hundreds of detentions were conducted under the Public Safety Act. Further, the NCRB stopped collecting data on lynchings and hate crimes from 2017 onwards, stating that the data collected was “unreliable”. By deciding what “counts,” the state ultimately will dictate what “counts” as a national issue.
Toward a Politics of Care
While the NCRB’s Crime in India report quantifies violence enacted by other people, Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India quantifies violence enacted by systems — by poverty, patriarchy, and policy. Still, states treat these deaths not as a social emergency, but as a statistical inevitability. A humane interpretation of the numbers insists that we view suicide not as the failing of an individual, but as the failing of governance.
There are still signs of resilience. Grassroots organizations like Kisan Mitra Helpline, Students’ Collective for Mental Health, and SNEHA have sought to offer mental health counselling, debt mediation, and legal aid to communities at risk. The Supreme Court’s latest directions to improve student mental health are also positive, but without an investment in a mental health infrastructure, these are largely symbolic.
To address India’s suicide epidemic, policy needs to shift from counting deaths to preventing deaths. This requires an acknowledgement of the structural nature of despair, deeply rooted in inequity of wealth, caste humiliation, and gendered violence, and a reimagining of the welfare state as one of care, rather than control. Until then, each number in the NCRB’s ledger will remain an indictment of a country that is still growing but not healing.
The Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India report serves a dual purpose, chronicling suffering and depoliticizing it. Each suicide occurs as an isolated act, separated from the systems that created it. The result is a perception of neutrality; the data is both the proof and the excuse.
The judgment in Sukdeb Saha v. State of Andhra Pradesh can be read here.
(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)
Image Courtesy: fau.edu
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