Bharat Bhushan | Dying To Work: India’s Silent Crisis Of Suicides

Alarming figures have emerged about India’s most vulnerable labour force -- the daily wage earners -- showing suicide rates reaching epidemic proportions.

The Narendra Modi government has consistently projected a narrative of strong post-pandemic economic recovery. However, its rhetoric has focused mostly on macroeconomic indicators and the middle classes, leaving the issue of daily wage earners unaddressed in substance.

The latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that suicides among daily wage workers in India have risen by a shocking 45 per cent in five years from 2017 (32,559 suicides), to 2023 (47,170 suicides). The data for 2023 shows that suicides by daily wage earners accounted for 27.5 per cent of all suicides in the country, compared to 22.40 per cent in 2017.

Over 450 million Indians work in the informal sector.

The post-pandemic crisis for this group of vulnerable workers is far from over. The stress of working in the informal economy without job security and social protection is worsened because of the long-term fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of wage cuts, job losses and reverse migration.

Stress has intensified especially among workers with no land or other resources. Those likely to be most affected are Dalits, women and reverse migrants, among whom the vulnerability of daily wage workers intersects with caste, gender and migration.

Apart from the economic precarity of informal work, there is the social exclusion of Dalit and Adivasi workers; wage theft; the added burden on women workers of domestic violence and unpaid labour, and lower access to jobs, housing and healthcare among reverse migrants.

The Modi government’s flagship schemes like “Atma Nirbhar Bharat” and “Make in India” are touted as job creation initiatives in manufacturing and infrastructure but daily wage workers have been consistently missing from the government’s radar and its rhetoric of economic recovery.

There is no post-pandemic relief package targeted for the informal sector workers. Nor is there any mention in the Union Budget 2025 about urban employment guarantees or mental health outreach for them.

The government has discontinued key planning tools at its disposal, making it more difficult to plan for the relief of informal workers. In 2017, the five yearly Employment-Unemployment Survey conducted since Independence by the National Sample Survey was discontinued. It used to provide granular data on joblessness, underemployment and informal sector trends.

In March 2018, the Labour Bureau’s Quarterly Enterprise Surveys were discontinued. They tracked employment trends in formal enterprises across sectors. This has weakened the government’s ability to monitor job creation in manufacturing and services.

The absence of consistent time series public data has not only reduced transparency and undermined democratic accountability, but has, above all, constrained the assessment of the impact of the pandemic.

The vulnerabilities of urban and rural wage workers are quite distinct, although the NCRB data does not disaggregate them.

In urban India, the key sources of insecurity are the volatility of the “gig”, or platform economy, absence of contracts and grievance redressal, increased surveillance and control (especially of gig workers), housing insecurity and absence of legal protection. In rural areas, the structure of vulnerability is shaped by the seasonality of employment, landlessness, debt traps, climate vulnerability impacting work opportunities and caste hierarchies dictating access to work and wages.

For ameliorating conditions for urban daily wage workers, Telangana’s Bharath Rashtra Samithi has proposed a National Urban Employment Guarantee Scheme, designed on the lines of MGNREGA, to safeguard the livelihoods of the urban poor.

Indian gig workers were included in the ambit of labour laws for the first time in 2020 by the ministry of labour and employment through the Code on Social Security that mandates social protection schemes for them. But there is no Bill of Rights for platform workers in the country as yet.

In 2023 Rajasthan enacted the Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act. It established a Welfare Board and a social security and welfare fund for gig workers and mandated the registration of gig workers and platforms and access to welfare schemes. It also mandated aggregators (e.g. app-based platforms) to contribute to the welfare fund (no share was specified) and set up a mechanism for filing complaints about entitlements, payments, and benefits.

Building on Rajasthan’s attempts, a model law for gig workers could be formulated to be adopted by the states, mandating fair wages, data transparency, job security, minimum working hours and accident insurance. Such a law must recognise the power asymmetry built in gig work in terms of control, pricing and unilateral making of rules by the aggregator/employer.

In addition, given the structural vulnerability of urban daily wage workers, dramatically made more visible by reverse migration during the pandemic, the government needs to provide rental security by expanding affordable housing and preventing forced evictions.

For daily wagers in rural areas, social activists have emphasised the need to expand MGNREGA, from 100 days of guaranteed work per year per rural household to 150 days. In addition, legalising and protecting tenancies of landless workers, enabling low-interest loans via self-help groups and cooperatives and tailoring welfare and mental health support for vulnerable workers to be caste-sensitive.

In 2023, the government admitted in Parliament that daily wage workers were the largest group among suicide victims between 2019 and 2023. In response to a question on the subject, it referred to the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 as the framework for addressing their welfare. However, no new suicide specific policy intervention was announced.

None of the welfare schemes of the government are tailored to suicide prevention among daily wage earners. They do not address their mental health, income volatility or the workplace distress -- the key drivers of suicide among them.

The longer the despair of those who build our cities; sow, irrigate and harvest our crops; and power the near-instant deliveries of goods and services for the urban middle class, the more intense their proclivity to give up on life will become. Suicide prevention in this vulnerable population must become a national priority if their lost lives are not to be just another yearly statistic.