Statistics often conceal more than they reveal. Yet, every now and then, a stark number breaks through the fog of indifference. One such figure appeared in the media on Tuesday: from January to June 2025, 520 people died by suicide in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. This marks a sharp 20 per cent increase from the 430 deaths during the same period last year. Ordinarily, this should have triggered outrage and urgent discussion, both in the government and the Opposition. But not even a murmur has been heard. Instead, Maharashtra’s political leaders are busy debating divisive distractions like whether everyone in Mumbai must speak Marathi or whether Aurangzeb’s tomb should remain a protected monument—real non-issues in comparison to the silent epidemic engulfing the state’s rural hinterland.
The numbers belie any claim that the state government has brought the suicide crisis under control. The Devendra Fadnavis-led administration cannot, in all fairness, shift the blame onto its predecessors. These deaths continue to shake ordinary families, wrecking livelihoods and devastating communities. When 520 farmers take their own lives, 520 families are destroyed and many more are adversely affected. What’s more tragic is that most of these deaths are rooted in deepening pauperisation and despair in the countryside. Maharashtra, often described as one of India’s wealthiest and most industrialised states, paradoxically leads the nation in suicide rates. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the state recorded 4,288 suicides in 2022—nearly twice the figure of Karnataka, the next highest, at 2,392. Over the past decade, India has seen a staggering 1,12,000 suicides, and yet the political will to address the causes remains alarmingly absent.
Those familiar with the ground realities know that even these numbers are under-reported. Social stigma and systemic apathy combine to keep the true extent of the crisis hidden. Families often request the police not to record suicides formally, fearing further humiliation and the denial of insurance claims. Police, lacking incentives and compassion, oblige. The causes of farmer suicides are both varied and interconnected: mounting debt from unsustainable loans, addiction issues aggravated by despair, increasingly erratic weather patterns and environmental degradation, consistently poor market prices for produce, mounting stress and family burdens, an uncaring bureaucracy, poor irrigation facilities, soaring input costs, the tyranny of private moneylenders, harmful dependence on chemical fertilisers, and repeated crop failures—each a thread in a tragic tale. These factors create a suffocating cycle of hopelessness that traps even the most strong-willed farmers, robbing them of dignity and any sense of a future. When the state fails to respond to such cries for help, democracy itself begins to falter. Silence, in this case, is not neutrality—it is complicity.
