Before becoming the Prime Minister of India in 2014, Narendra Modi had promised to create 20 million jobs per year. However, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has mentioned in its latest report that suicides due to unemployment went up by 24% from 2016 to 2019. NCRB is an Indian Government agency, responsible for collecting and analysing crime data as defined by the Indian Penal Code and Special and Local Laws. The Bureau is headquartered in New Delhi and is part of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs.

As per the NCRB data, 2,298 Indians had committed suicide in 2016 because of unemployment. The figure jumped to 2,851 in 2019. In between, 2,404 unemployed people had reportedly committed suicide in 2017, and 2,741 in 2018.

The southern Indian Province of Karnataka recorded the highest number (553) of suicides due to unemployment in 2019. Karnataka was followed by Maharashtra (452), Tamil Nadu (251), Jharkhand (232) and Gujarat (219). Meanwhile, just 40 of the unemployed committed suicide in eastern Province of West Bengal that year.

The rate of unemployment reached a 45-year high in the Modi era even before the outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic in the South Asian nation. It is feared that the situation has deteriorated further in the last couple of years, due to the Pandemic. The NCRB admitted in 2020 that the maximum number of daily wage labourers committed suicides in a decade. Since 1995, the Bureau has been collecting and publishing data on “accidental deaths and suicides” at the national level.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das