Changing Climate forcing desperate Indian farmers to suicide and the rate is overwhelming

India’s rapidly growing trends of suicide are linked to crop damage due to increasing temperature over the last 30 years, one latest study finds.

One fifth of the world’s suicides occur in India, normally at more than 130,000 deaths per year. The majority portion of Indian population is employed in agriculture.

Crop damage because of increasing temperatures has been suspected to be behind the expanding pattern in suicides in the previous three decades.

Almost all parts of India are encountering rising temperatures because of climate change, the study says.

A $1.3-billion climate-based crop insurance is introduced politically but it needs strong proof to back them up.

Presently scientists have discovered that suicide rates are higher in years where temperatures are hotter amid the crop season.

This is the point at which the yields are most sensitive to temperature, and more inclined to come up short if it is excessively hot.

A total of 59,000 suicides has been connected to these above-average temperatures in the course of recent years.

Tamma Carleton of the University of California, Berkeley, says in the study that ‘despite lack of substantiation, public debate in India has centred around one possible cause of rapidly rising suicide rates”

Dry season and heat highlight noticeably in these cases; climate occasions are contended to harm crop yields, worsening farmers’ debt burdens and initiating some to commit suicide accordingly.”

Carleton broke down 47 years of suicide records and climate information from each of India’s 32 states and union regions to distinguish the pattern.

For each day when temperatures transcended a normal of 20C in the crop season, there were an extra 67 deaths across India.

The findings are expected to encourage Indian national strategies to handle climate related suicides, the study published in the journal PINAS on Monday suggests.

India alone is predicted to encounter an average temperature increase of up to 3C by 2050.

“Without investments in adaptation, my findings suggest that this warming will be accompanied by a rising number of lives lost to self-harm,” Carleton concludes.