Death by suicide among women farmers in India is substantially underreported, as the labour of women on farms is often invisible even to their own communities. As global temperatures rise, we report how India’s beleaguered women farmers now battle climate change along with enduring stigmas and harassment.

Draped in saris of orange, blue, red and green hues, the women wore every marker of marital status, indicators of a husband well and alive—bindis on their forehead, red bangles clinking on their wrists and mangalsutras around their necks.

They were, in fact, farm widows whose husbands died by suicide over the past decade in Maharashtra’s north-eastern Vidarbha region—a cotton-producing swathe of land larger than the state of Bihar.

Some of them had attempted to take their own lives.

Alka Ingle, 43, was in her early 20s when she tried to end her life. Already a mother of two young boys, she could no longer endure the regular beatings by her farmer husband. After a particularly traumatic incident, when he inserted a cigarette butt in her eye, she did not see the point of living, she said.

For Sarita Wairale, 36, the tipping point came with her sister-in-law’s allegation that she was having an affair with her brother-in-law after her farmer husband had died by suicide. Her 15-year-old son rescued her.

In 2020, across India, 10,677 individuals engaged in the farming sector died by suicide. Of these, a little less than 7% (721) were women, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

One in every three (36.6%) women who dies by suicide globally is an Indian woman, according to a 2018 Lancet study. The majority of these, when broken down by profession, are registered under the category of ‘housewives’.

There is a likely underreporting in data on women farmers who die by suicide in India, for rural women are neither seen as farmers by their communities nor consider themselves farmers, as earlier reports published by Article 14 have unpacked.

Read more- https://article-14.com/post/-climate-change-makes-the-hard-life-of-india-s-invisible-women-farmers-harder--61f0c2328a5be