New Delhi: National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) has released the crime data of 2018 stating that over 50 lakh cognizable crimes were registered in the year. According to the NCRB's 2018 report on accidental deaths and suicides, a total of 10,349 people involved in the farming sector committed suicide in 2018. Among them, 5,763 were farmers or cultivators and 4,586 were agricultural labourers.
Reacting to the latest report, Communist Party of India (CPI) National Secretary, Atul Kumar Anjan, said that no district administration wants to send the actual number of farmer suicides to the Central government, thus accounting for the reduction in the number of farming sector deaths in 2018.
Read: Farmers' suicides drops 7.7% in 2018, says NCRB
"If 10 deaths happen, they report four. In many places, the cause of farmer suicides has been credited to love failure. A union minister said this in the hall of the parliament" Anjan said.
He further stated that farmer suicides should not be neglected and said the government is giving a false narrative by claiming zero suicides happened in some regions. In 2017, a total of 10,655 farming sector-suicides were reported and in 2016, the suicide cases have gone higher at 11,379.
According to the report, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Goa, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Delhi, Lakshadweep and Puducherry reported zero suicides of farmers or cultivators and agricultural labourers during 2018.
Three months after releasing its crime data of 2017, the NCRB data on accidental deaths and suicides in India 2018 says that a total of 1,34,516 cases was reported in that particular year.
