India these days is hitting the headlines for wrong, and at times, quite depressing reasons. While the country’s higher GDP growth rate compared to the developed and other developing countries, and its capacity to hold its own in the face of a global meltdown does give one some comfort, a plethora of disturbing and distressing news tend to overshadow such positive developments. The recent report in an internationally renowned health journal that Indian women account for more than a third of global suicides and men for 24 per cent cannot but set all the people concerned over the well-being of their compatriots to serious introspection. The all-India figure of suicides in 2016 was a staggering 2,30,314 of which 63 per cent belonged to the age-group of 15 to 39 years. Another significant finding has been that there was a 40 per cent rise in the incidence of suicide in our country between 1990 and 2016. One can hardly be faulted if one tries to find a co-relation between this sudden spurt in suicides and globalisation. The health journal’s study underscores the reasons behind suicide among women which include child marriage, marital discord including pressure for dowry, domestic violence, lack of compatibility with spouse and in-laws, arranged marriage in which individual choice is stifled and lack of access to mental health care facilities. It also refers to the young Indians as the most vulnerable group among the males. These are but some of the traditional triggers. To these must be added the causes spawned by globalisation and technological super-revolution. In our country, thousands of farmers take their lives in the wake of either a crop failure or a bumper crop. In either case the farmer is the ultimate loser. Unable to recover the costs of production and pay back the private money-lenders or the banks they are forced to end their own lives- at times entering into a suicide pact with other members of the family including innocent children. There are few, if any, records of unemployment-related suicides or from depression. Lakhs of Indian families have been affected by job-related dispersals within the country and migration to other countries. Newspapers across the country carry every now and then reports of senior citizens, often couples, taking their own lives, unable to bear either the death of the only child in foreign shores or losing touch with the son or the daughter engaged by transnational corporations to push their juggernaut. Easy availability of smart phones and its wide range of applications which make or break relationship among the young people have also been found to have accelerated the tendency to commit suicide among a section of them. Unlike Bhutan which measures its prosperity in terms of happiness, India goes by the conventional yardsticks of GDP, exports, manufacturing and the like. But it is a sad country, and paying the price for the same.
