On the night of May 5, when Ramesh (name changed) returned home from work, he found the door ajar. Inside, his 55-year-old father Gurmeet Singh and mother Narender Kaur were lying still, with a bottle of poison beside them. A handwritten note by Gurmeet Singh said he was completely broken by the state of his life. Ramesh says his mother had been battling serious illnesses linked to prolonged diabetes, which had caused his father considerable mental anguish. Khushpal Singh, a panchayat member from his village, Pamal, in Punjab’s Ludhiana district tells Down To Earth (DTE) that the couple rarely socialised. Their financial situation was precarious. Gurmeet Singh had sold his farmland to send two of his children to Canada and was left without a means of livelihood. He acted as a guarantor for a loan taken by someone else, which left him responsible for repaying Rs 5-6 lakh. “Perhaps they felt that death was the only escape from the suffering,” Khushpal Singh adds.
Deaths by suicide are tragically common in India. While reports of farmers taking their own lives appear with disturbing regularity, illness claims far more lives through suicide than agrarian distress.
As per the latest report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), released in May, as many as 10,546 farmers and farm workers died by suicide across the country in 2024. By contrast, 30,617 people took their own lives because of illness. While mental illness accounted for 14,305 deaths by suicide, 14,075 cases were linked to prolonged diseases, states the report, “Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2024”.
Of the 170,746 suicides recorded across India that year, illness was the second most frequently cited cause, accounting for 18 per cent of cases, behind family problems (33.5 per cent). Put differently, an average of 84 people took their own lives each day in 2024 because of illness. The trend has been building for years. DTE has analysed 10 years of NCRB data, which shows suicides attributed to illness has risen by nearly 45 per cent, from 21,178 in 2015 to 30,617 in 2024. Their share in all suicides increased from 16 per cent to 18 per cent during the decade.
The number of states and Union Territories (UTs) where illness linked suicides exceed the national share has also risen. In 2015, the percentage share of illness-linked suicides in total suicide cases remained above national average in some 12 states and UTs. By 2024, that number rose to 16. Lakshadweep had the highest 100 per cent share, with all three recorded suicides attributed to illness. It was followed by Punjab, where 50.4 per cent, or every second suicide, was linked to health problems. In Sikkim, the figure was 34.4 per cent.
Even these figures may understate the scale of the problem. Researchers and mental-health experts have long highlighted that official suicide statistics fail to capture …
This article was originally published in the July 1-15, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth, which also features exclusive data on suicide statistics in India