Assertions that the suicide rate among the country’s agricultural workers is nearly three times the national average are widely believed in India, but precise figures are difficult to come by. (Health workers, social scientists and statisticians point out that the issue is extremely complex.) The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 170,000 Indians in all walks of life commit suicide every year; the Indian government put the figure at about 135,000 in 2010. That is misleading, not least because suicide is a crime in India, and as such falls under the purview of the National Crime Records Bureau. The social stigma it brings, and the risk that it may mean a loss of government compensation, feeds a family’s reluctance to report such deaths. Moreover, many suicides occur among agricultural workers who are not officially categorized as farmers.

“There is likely to be a serious underestimation of suicides,” Professor K. Nagaraj, an economist at the Asian College of Journalism wrote in a 2008 report. “The most important problem is the way a farmer is defined at the ground level — as someone who has a title to land. This is likely, for instance, to leave out tenant farmers, and, particularly, women farmers.” These factors, according to Mr. Nagaraj, amount to a “conspiracy of silence.”

Other studies raise more ambiguity. “Suicide Mortality in India,” a report by eight Indian doctors and public health professionals published in the British medical journal Lancet in 2012, estimates that there were 187,000 such deaths in India in 2010: 115,000 men and 72,000 women. But the authors added, “Although most suicide deaths occur in rural areas, our findings do not suggest that suicide is any more prevalent in agricultural workers (including farmers) than it is in any other profession.”

Whether or not perception exceeds reality, there is no denying that India’s farmers have taken a battering in recent years. The global competition that came with the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 has cut into earnings. Costs soared when genetically modified seeds produced by foreign agricultural-products companies flooded Indian markets in the late 1990s. Most traditional farmers are now forced to borrow, often from private moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates.

Though it’s little wonder that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Indian National Congress has lost ground among farmers, other candidates are doing no better. Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party swooped into Vidarbha last month with a promise to declare the recent weather-ravaged farm conditions a “national calamity.” Another of the main prime ministerial candidates — Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party — has also made the kind of last-minute campaign promises that farmers have heard before.