Delhi has highest number of suicide cases over ‘love affairs’: Report

According to the report, 1,847 suicide cases were recorded in the city area of Delhi in 2014, which has a population of nearly 1.63 crore, according to the 2011 census. In the union territory (UT) area of Delhi, with a ‘projected mid-year population’ of 2.02 crore in 2014, 2,095 suicide cases were recorded.

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As many as 63 people, including 38 men and 25 women, committed suicide over ‘love affairs’, said the report.

The capital’s neighbouring cities recorded fewer cases of suicides over ‘love affairs’, according to the report. Chandigarh recorded 21 such suicides, while Jaipur and Ghaziabad recorded seven and 10 cases respectively, it stated.

Suicides over ‘love affairs’ accounted for 3.2 percent of the total number of suicides in India, said the report.

The NCRB report has been at the centre of controversy after Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh cited its findings in Parliament and listed ‘love affairs’ and ‘impotency’ as some of the reasons behind the sensitive issue of farmer suicides.

Delhi also holds the dubious distinction of having the second highest reported cases of suicides due to ‘dowry-related issues’ — 66. Only Bhopal, with 106 such cases in 2014, fared worse than Delhi in the category, stated the report.

The number of such suicide cases in neighbouring cities highlights how worrying the capital’s statistics are. While Chandigarh recorded no such cases of suicides, Ghaziabad and Jaipur recorded six and four cases of suicides over ‘dowry-related issues’ respectively.

“The proportion of female victims were more in ‘Marriage Related Issues’ like ‘Non-Settlement of Marriage’, ‘Dowry Related Issues’, ‘Extra-Marital Issues’, ‘Divorce’. Apart from this, ‘Failure in Examination’, ‘Impotency/Infertility’ and ‘Physical Abuse (Rape)’ were also major causes of suicides among females than among males,” said the report.

When compared with other states and UTs, Delhi ranked seventh in the category of suicides due to ‘dowry-related issues’, with 73 such cases. The six states which fared worse than Delhi — Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Odisha — have a much higher population than the capital.

Responding to the report’s findings, Rajan Bhagat, PRO of Delhi Police, said, “We haven’t yet completed assessing the data in the NCRB report. We can’t comment on any trend prior to our own analysis.”