A worsening agrarian disasterĪs per the 2011 Census, India has approximately 263.1 million agricultural workers, and roughly 57.8 per cent of rural households are engaged in smallholder farming. This is a staggering 113 per cent rise from 2014 when daily wage earners comprised 12 per cent of recorded suicide cases. Moreover, for the first time, India’s daily wage earners comprised over 25 per cent of the country’s deaths by suicide in 2021. Since 2010, India has lost over 1.6 million people to suicide, with numbers rising 7.1 per cent in 2021 to reach an all-time high since records began. He would ask me why I tried saving him.”Īrjun is one of 164,033 Indians who died by suicide in 2021. “During that time he was so frustrated that while he was still alive he kept yelling at me. “After eight days, we lost him,” she recalls, sadly. Although she rushed him to a local doctor and later to a district hospital, the damage had already been done. The following evening, Supriya found him consuming pesticides. “The frustration was evident as he took to alcohol quite often,” recalls Supriya.Ī day before his suicide attempt, Arjun told his mother that it would be the last time she would see him. But 13 months into the pandemic and with no work, Arjun, a father of three, began to lose hope. The Kagwade family, from Khochi village in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, managed to survive thanks to Supriya, who works as a tenant-farmer cultivating sugarcane, groundnuts and soybeans. Most of the workers, who previously kept India’s cities running – cooking and serving food, driving transport, working in construction and collecting waste, amongst other jobs – returned to their home villages where, in theory, they could at least grow enough food to eat. Moreover, by December 2020, an additional 15 million people, including Arjun, remained out of work. Some 79 million small traders and daily wage earners lost their jobs within a month, while some 230 million Indians were pushed into poverty during the first year of the pandemic. Images beamed around the world of millions of daily wage workers fleeing India’s shuttered cities and attempting to return to their home villages on foot. In March 2020, India’s far-right prime minister Narendra Modi declared a 21-day total lockdown (later extended to 67 days) to curb the spread of Covid-19 with a mere four-hour notice. “He would joke around, but looking at his face, I knew something was wrong.” However, he always ignored her questions, raising more doubts. His frustration wasn’t visible to anyone around him except her. “He was desperately looking for a job,” she tells Equal Times. Supriya Kagwade learned over a hundred different ways to ask: ‘Is everything OK?’ “However, all of them failed,” she says, as her husband, Arjun, died by suicide in April 2021.
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