New Delhi: Daily wage earners will account for 31 per cent of all suicide deaths by 2024, the highest proportion in a decade (2015-2024), according to the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). A total of 52,910 daily wage workers committed suicide throughout the year, a sharp increase from the peak of 26.4% in 2022.Casual workers, which mainly include daily wage earners, constitute nearly one-fifth of India’s workforce and are the largest segment. The total number of suicide deaths in the country will increase to 170,000 in 2024, compared with 134,000 in 2015.
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A comparative analysis of the number of suicide deaths since 2015 shows that daily wage earners, housewives and self-employed people continue to occupy the three major categories of “suicides by occupation”. However, the proportion of suicides among housewives and self-employed people has fallen over the past decade.Similarly, the proportion of suicide deaths among workers in the agricultural sector will decrease from 8.7% in 2016 to 6.2% in 2024. The agriculture category was introduced in the NCRB India Accidental Deaths and Suicides Report 2016.According to the NCRB report 2024, Tamil Nadu has the highest number of suicides among daily wage earners at 10,556, accounting for almost one-fifth of the suicides in the country, followed by Maharashtra (6,811), Telangana (5,745), Madhya Pradesh (5,299) and Chhattisgarh (3,413). Among Union Territories, Delhi reported the highest number of such deaths at 343.The report also stated that in 2024, 62.9% of suicide victims (about 1.100,000) had an annual income of less than Rs 1 lakh. Among the causes of suicide, “family problems” are still the primary cause, accounting for 35% of all deaths, followed by “disease”, accounting for 17.9%.The main ways of death by suicide are hanging (62.3%), taking poison (24.5%), drowning (4.4%) and being crushed to death by a moving vehicle or train (2.5%).
