Data from the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report shows that suicides by daily wage earners increased between 2014 and 2016. The report states that as many as 25,164 daily wage earners committed suicide in 2016.
The number in 2016 is 5.7 per cent more than the previous year’s (2015) when such suicides by daily wage earners were recorded at 23,799.
There was an increase of 60 per cent in such suicides between 2014 and 2016. Suicides by daily wage earners were 15,735 in 2014 whereas they were reported to be 25,164 in 2016.
Also read: NCRB report for 2016 shows 11,379 farmers committed suicide, Maharashtra tops list
A possible explanation for the distress among daily wage earners could lie in the non-farm sector’s linkages to the farm sector, Livemint quoted Anamitra Roychowdhury, assistant professor at the informal sector and labour studies department of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi as saying.
“Consecutive years of drought in 2014 and 2015 likely increased the supply of labour to the non-farm sector, impacting wages and availability of work. The fact that growth in real wages for casual labourers halved between 2004-2011 and 2011-2017 (according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey report released in 2019) also paints a dismal picture for the non-farm sector,” Roychowdhury said.