Addressing suicide: Learning from a multilevel approach to farmers’ suicide

Abstract

Farmers’ suicide in India has become a controversial issue, with political repercussions along with attendant huge loan waiver and vote bank politics. As an academic task it begs the question is farmers’ suicide really a cause of concern? And we think so, but with a nuanced understanding. Rather than broad generalization of it being a countrywide problem and keeping in view the niceties, we turn to extant literature that has tried to dwell into the causes for this phenomenon.  We use an interdisciplinary lens to review selected literature and analyse this. Concluding from this analysis we suggest a multilevel approach that is both pragmatic and useful to understand farmers’ suicide and theoretically mature to think about suicides in general. The commentary does not propose solutions, though this may be implicit, the larger aim is to theorise about factors for suicide in general.

 

Keywords: farmers’ suicide, agrarian distress, India, multilevel framework