Beti padhao fails at Beti bachao

The general perceptionrdquo says professor Rakhi Dandona ldquois that education empowers women by providing them with career opportunities and autonomy Our findings however show that even with high levels of education women in this country may not be able to obtain the lsquoempowermentrsquo that we talk aboutrdquoDandona who works with the Public Health Foundation of India PHFI and is a professor of Global Health at the University of Washington has been researching the prevalence of female suicide in India for several yearsldquoItrsquos a research area very close to my heartrdquo she tells midday ldquoGlobally men tend to have higher suicide rates than women and so there has been a sustained research emphasis on male suicides While this gender difference remains true for India we also have a shockingly high rate of female suicides compared to other countries This is why we wanted to look into the sociodemographic explanations for the high prevalence of female suicide in IndiardquoDandona and her colleagues at PHFI recently conducted a study the results of which were published in May this year Their research focused on the demographic factors behind female suicides which call into question some longheld beliefs about suicideFor this PHFI used data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau NCRB which publishes its annual reports on crimes and other related statistics on its website According to the figures mentioned in its Accidental Deaths and Suicides chapter a total of 45026 women died by suicide in 2021 The same figure stood at 44498 in 2020Studying the NCRB data from 2014 to 2020 PHFI found that the suicide rate was significantly higher for women with an education level of Class VI or higher as compared to women who had no educationldquoWe felt that the implications of this finding were very unique The idea that prevails is that educated women should be better able to live autonomously earn their own money and therefore should be less likely to take their own lives Our study evidently did not support this idea although some past research has Clearly education and empowerment do not go handinhand for these women in this regardrdquo says DandonaThe study also looked at potential reasons for suicide among Indian women and found that the most common reason mentioned on police reports was ldquofamily problemsrdquo which accounted for 363 per cent of the deaths in India Health was the secondhighest recorded reason while marriage was recorded as a reason more frequently in less developed statesldquoThe issue with this findingrdquo the public health epidemiology expert says ldquois the lack of a clear definition of lsquofamily problemsrsquo The data is collated by police across the country from small villages to big cities The tools are not standardised enough to tell us what specific elements to look atrdquoThe study which obtained funding from the Bill amp Melinda Gates Foundation also challenges assertions that married women are more likely to die by suicide as compared to single women A widelyreported statistic from the NCRB is that 50 per cent of female suicide victims in India are housewives by profession However Dandona explains ldquoIf you look at that finding on its own itrsquos easy to make the assumption that housewives are taking their lives more than anyone else For policy makers seeing results like this would encourage them to focus their attention on married women but this doesnrsquot account for the fact that a very large proportion of women in India are housewives by occupation There are more police reports about married women dying by suicide because they make up a very large proportion of the populationrdquoDandonarsquos study avoided this problem by extrapolating the results to the population level ldquoWe ultimately found that contrary to many peoplersquos expectations there was no significant difference between the suicide death rate of women who had never married and that of married women Whatrsquos even more striking is that the suicide death rate of women that had never married is increasing according to our resultsrdquoIt is perhaps high time to relook the way suicides are approached by the authorities with sensitivity and prevention being the top priority As PHFIrsquos report states ldquoThe reasons provided in the tabulated formats in the NCRB data were not nuanced enough to offer insights that could facilitate interventions by state age marital status or educationrdquoFuture research Dandona adds should employ qualitative measures to understand the reasons behind suicide in more depth and determine what interventions need to be made Top findings from the study1 Family problems was the most common reason for suicide from 2014 to 2020 accounting for 363 per cent of reported suicide deaths2 In 2020 the suicide death rate was higher among women with an education of Class VI or more 102 than those with no education 38 or education until Class V 54 with similar patterns in most states3 The suicide death rate by occupation in 2020 was higher for women who worked outside the home as compared with housewives with the highest suicide death rate for those who were unemployed