Young India is drinking up rat poison or hanging itself by the noose or lying down on railway tracks to end lives at an alarming rate, if a new study in Lancet is to be believed. After road accidents in men and childbirth related deaths in women, the second most important cause of death in India seems to be suicide, according the study which relies on data from the the Registrar General of India (RGI).

The RGI conducted a national mortality survey between 2001 and 2003 to determine the cause of deaths in 1·1 million homes chosen randomly from all parts of India.

Killing young India?{credit}Photodisc/Brand X{/credit}

What the researchers have now done is this: they have applied the age-specific and sex-specific proportion of suicide deaths in this survey to the 2010 UN estimates of absolute numbers of deaths in India. Thus they arrived at an estimation on the number of suicide deaths in India in 2010. What they found is shocking:  about 3% of the deaths among people over 15 years of age were due to suicide. This accounts for  about 1,87, 000 suicide deaths in India in 2010 at these ages — 1,15, 000 men and 72, 000 women.

Even more shocking was the estimation that 40% of suicide deaths in men and 56% in women were between 15 and 29 years of age. About half of suicide deaths were due to poisoning, mainly through pesticides.

The researchers suggest suitable public health interventions such as restrictions in access to pesticides to prevent this alarming trend. However, the trigger for committing suicide might be a more appropriate subject to look at and plug than the method of committing suicide.

If the study estimates are not way off the mark, just what is making India’s youth lose hope?

[The researchers of this study were drawn from Epidemiological Research Centre, Chennai; Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh; Society for the Natal Effect on Health in Adults, Chennai and National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore. They collaborated with researchers from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Dalla Lana School of Public Health and University of Toronto, Canada to make the estimates.]