Chennai tops in suicide cases in India

This is a statistic, which lends a dubious distinction to the city of Chennai. The southern city tops in suicide cases at the all-India level, as far as records collated by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB NCRB) show. In 2019, as data reveals, 2,461 people killed themselves in the capital city of Tamil Nadu.

A closer look at the numbers put out by NCRB highlights that 1,39,123 people lost their lives all across the country to suicides. Half of these cases occurred in five states of India. 15 per cent of the cases were of those women who were essentially home-bound.

Maharashtra tops the country with 18, 916 cases with Tamil Nadu in the second position with 12,665 cases. For the past three years, Tamil Nadu has retained this unenviable slot. TN also leads in cases where families jointly enter into suicide pacts and die. Additionally, at the pan-Indian level, 10,281 farmers and 42,480 labourers lost their lives to suicides in 2019.

With a very high level of symbiotic relationships seen in Tamil Nadu between the political leaders, cinema stars, spiritual gurus and the public, considered by and large to be emotional and high-strung, the numbers reveal the sordid picture prevalent, for sure.