Suicide in a central Indian steel town

Abstract

Over the past 15 years ‘farmer suicides’ have occasioned grave public concern; and it has recently been claimed that Chhattisgarh has the highest incidence in the country. This article suggests that the representation of such cases as the major public policy problem to do with self-inflicted death is politically inflected and that there are good grounds for supposing that—at least in certain pockets—the urban suicide rate is as high, if not higher. In the industrial area around steel town of Bhilai, this has risen dramatically over the last 20 years and it is the aristocracy of public sector labour that is significantly most susceptible. This is ultimately attributable to the liberalisation of the economy and the consequent downsizing of this workforce, which has led to a crisis in the reproduction of class status. Such workers are privileged; think of themselves as different from the informal sector ‘labour class’ and fear sinking into it. Suicides are significantly under-reported and the official statistics are systematically inflected by fear of the police and the law, which encourage both concealment and the deliberate obfuscation of likely motives, and almost certainly increase the ‘lethal probabilities’ of suicide attempts.