It may not be out of place to mention here that 2020 was the year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the people of the country beat utensils and light lamps to drive Corona away, before giving just four hours’ notice of a nationwide lockdown, bringing the whole economy to a grinding halt.We had then witnessed widespread chaos and the heart-rending exodus of migrant workers to their homes on foot along with frail women and children, without food and with no hope of finding any on the way due to the lockdown. Many of them simply perished, but the Union government said in Parliament that it doesn’t have records of their deaths when it came to the issue of grant of compensation to their kin.However, the Union government can’t deny knowledge of suicides due to joblessness. Presently, it is trying to shift blame for the suicides on COVID-19. But on whom will they shift the blame for increasing suicides before the pandemic struck the country?NCRB data reveals that suicides due to unemployment have been increasing over the last few years, ever since Modi government took the reins of the country in 2014, the year when 2,207 suicides were recorded. In 2015 the figure rose to 2,723 and dropped to 2,298 in 2016 which was still higher than the 2014 level.However, after 2016, it has been steadily rising. In 2017, the number of persons who died by suicide due to unemployment rose to 2,404, which increased to 2,741 in 2018 and 2,851 in 2019.By 2020, the five states most prone to suicides due to unemployment were Karnataka with 720 suicides, followed by Maharashtra with 625, Tamil Nadu with 336, Assam with 234, and Uttar Pradesh with 227.
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