EARLIER this year a neighbour dropped by the Chundawats’ house in the northern suburbs of Delhi, wondering why his friend Lalit had not opened his nearby shop. When he let himself in the reason became clear. Everyone inside—11 people from three generations—was dead. Two brothers, their wives, a sister and their children dangled from the ceiling in a hallway, suspended by ropes, blindfolded, hands tied. The family matriarch, 77-year-old Narayani Devi, lay strangled nearby. Only Tommy, a dog, survived.
Police say the deaths were a mass suicide, most likely prompted by occult beliefs. Yet, strange though the incident appeared, the Chundawats’ death was only one of numerous collective suicides across India this summer. In July in the state of Jharkhand alone, two families killed themselves, driven by the more prosaic motive of despair over debt.
Suicide is often seen as a rich-world problem, but is all too common in India. New research, published this week in the Lancet, a medical journal, reveals that India suffers from perhaps 230,000 a year, nearly double previous estimates. With 18% of the world’s population, it is responsible for nearly a quarter of suicides among men worldwide, and almost four out of ten among women. Suicide is the leading cause of death for all Indians between the ages of 15 and 39, and for Indian women between the ages of 15 and 49.
The paper’s lead author, Rakhi Dandona of the Public Health Foundation of India, says that previous estimates for suicides relied solely on police reports. These tended to undercount, not least because until last year Indian law considered suicide, as well as “abetment” of it, a crime. Her team instead extrapolated results for the past 25 years from a range of nationwide medical records, including nearly half a million autopsy reports.
India’s suicide rate, like the global one, is falling. But whereas the rate among women worldwide has fallen by half since 1990, and in China by an astonishing 70%, in India it has dropped by just 25%. And just as South Korea and Russia have relatively high suicide rates, but most Muslim-majority countries relatively low ones, there is stark geographical variation among Indian states (see chart). A woman in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, for example, is ten times more likely to commit suicide than one in jungle-bound Mizoram in the north-east. Men in the poorest state, Bihar, kill themselves at a quarter of the rate of those in bustling Karnataka, the heart of India’s technology industry.
Partly because suicide was criminalised for so long, there has been little research into its causes. “The determinants for such huge differences are not understood,” says Dr Dandona. “South Indians may be inclined to internalise their troubles, whereas northerners verbalise, but that is pure speculation.” There have been no studies of differences among India’s religious groups, although there is some evidence that Muslims are much less likely than Christians and Hindus to do themselves in. And no one knows whether caste plays a role, although suicide rates seem to rise with wealth and urbanisation, before falling again as the newly urbanised grow accustomed to their environment.
What does seem sure is that suicide rates will continue to fall, perhaps dramatically. The ubiquity of televisions and mobile phones has diminished individual isolation, for example for wives oppressed by demanding mothers-in-law. It has also made more Indians aware and accepting of ways to seek help for mental problems.
De-criminalising suicide has also made it easier to discuss and investigate the issue. Earlier this year the Supreme Court quoted an eloquent argument for a more compassionate view: “If the right to life were only a right to decide to continue living and did not also include a right to decide not to continue living, then it would be a duty to live rather than a right to life.”
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Deadly reckoning" （Sep 20th 2018）