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Understanding farmers’ suicidal ideation: a structural equation modeling study in Maharashtra, India

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Abstract

India is witnessing an increasing rate of farmers’ suicide, which has been attributed to indebtedness by most of the studies. Indebtedness can be attributed to multiple factors, including individual, household, community, climatic, institutional, and market-oriented factors. The majority of studies have related these factors with indebtedness in isolation, but the conflating effect of these factors has not been investigated. Moreover, it is observed that farmers follow different adaptation measures to deal with crop failure and socio-economic and climatic stressors, which also play a significant role in their well-being. However, the relationship of these adaptation measures toward indebtedness and farmers’ suicide was found to be missing in the existing literature, which would otherwise provide valuable information regarding how to deal with farmers’ suicide. Considering the compounding effect of these factors on farmers’ suicide, we evaluated and quantified the relationship of individual, community, climatic, credit, and market-oriented factors with adaptation and indebtedness, which were subsequently related to suicidal ideation of farmers. This complex relationship was estimated using structural equation modeling (SEM) by surveying 400 farmers across 15 villages in Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of Maharashtra. SEM results show that individual traits, i.e., age, experience, and illness of farmers; community-oriented factors, i.e., provision of lakes, wells, water tanks; credit factor, i.e., moneylenders; perception of climate change; and market factors are the primary factors contributing toward farmers’ suicidal ideation. Adaptation was found to play a vital role in reducing the indebtedness and suicidal thoughts of the farming community. Results emphasize that a combined and thorough understanding of all the factors is required before making any recommendations to the government or any other decision-making entity.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. K. Narayanan from IIT Bombay for providing the valuable suggestions.

Funding

This work was supported by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (DST/CC/ PR/06/2011). Centre of Excellence in Climate Studies (IITB-CECS) project of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), New Delhi, India.

Data Availability

Data can be made available on request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies, Mumbai, India

    Deepika Swami, Prashant Dave & Devanathan Parthasarathy

  2. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Devanathan Parthasarathy

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  1. Deepika Swami
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Contributions

Deepika Swami: Writing manuscript, data modeling, data analysis;

Prashant Dave: Data modeling, Editing the manuscript, Results interpretation;

Devanathan Parthasarathy: Idea formulation, data analysis.

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Correspondence to Deepika Swami.

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Swami, D., Dave, P. & Parthasarathy, D. Understanding farmers’ suicidal ideation: a structural equation modeling study in Maharashtra, India. Climatic Change 163, 2175–2200 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02935-8

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