Suicide Insights and Trends in India (SITI)
Suicide is a major public health concern in India, and effective prevention efforts depend on reliable, accessible data that can reveal patterns, gaps, and opportunities for intervention.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) publishes annual suicide statistics through itsAccidental Deaths and Suicides in India (ADSI) report, offering insights disaggregated by age, sex, state, cause, method, and other demographic indicators. While this data is crucial for surveillance and trend analysis, it is often difficult to access and use effectively.
To bridge this gap, the Keshav Desiraju India Mental Health Observatory has developed an interactive, web-based suicide dashboard that compiles NCRB suicide data from 1967 onwards into a user-friendly platform. The dashboard aims to support advocacy, research, and evidence-based policymaking for suicide prevention in India.
- Improve access to longitudinal suicide data in an interactive and user-friendly format.
- Enable researchers, policymakers, and advocates to identify trends, patterns, and high-risk groups.
- Support evidence-based suicide prevention strategies.
- Strengthen awareness, advocacy, and informed dialogue around suicide prevention in India.
Click the button labelled SITI Dashboard on the right of the webpage to access the dashboard.
At the top of the dashboard, you will find a drop-down menu labelled Select visualisation containing all available visualisations. The dashboard uses a variety of visual formats, including bubble charts, heatmaps, line charts, choropleth maps, stacked area charts, pie charts, and tree maps. The visualisations are interactive, and each of them allows you to filter by year. List of visualisations include:
- Demographic Breakdown of Suicides
- Number of Suicides and Suicide Rates Across India
- Number of Suicides and Suicide Rates by State
- Suicides by Age and Gender
- Suicides by Causes
- Suicides by Methods
- Suicides by Profession
- Suicides by Education Level
- Suicides by Income Level
- Suicides by Marital Status
Select a visualisation from the menu to explore a specific aspect of the suicide data.
Every visualisation is accompanied by a description explaining its purpose.
Notes are included below each visualisation to highlight any data gaps or discrepancies.
To access our datasets, please fill this form or write to us at imho@cmhlp.org.
The dashboard was developed by consolidating all available NCRB suicide data from the Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India (ADSI) reports and tables published over several decades. For older reports where selectable text was unavailable, data was extracted using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. For some of the reports manual extraction was used.
Tableau was used to design an interactive and accessible interface that enables users to explore trends and patterns in the data effectively.
The NCRB collects suicide data from police FIRs rather than from public health systems. As a result, suicide classification depends on police investigation and reporting practices which are further influenced by stigma, family reluctance and variation in recording procedures across the states. This results in underreporting of suicides.
There is evidence of underreporting as compared to the Global Burden of Diseases estimates released by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Patel et al. (2012) used a nationally representative verbal autopsy study and estimated substantially higher suicide deaths than official records for the same period, suggesting that suicides in India may be significantly underreported, particularly among women and in rural areas. Lakshmi Vijayakumar et al. (2020) found that a community-based suicide surveillance system in rural Gujarat identified more than twice as many suicide deaths as hospital and police records combined, highlighting the limitations of relying solely on official reporting systems to estimate suicide mortality.
Additionally, in the NCRB data collected, the following gaps exist:
- For the years 2001-2003, data on profession, education level and marital status is not available.
- For the year 2012, West Bengal did not provide disaggregated data for some categories such as cause and profession. Totals of these sub-categories do not match with total suicides.
- The age-group classifications used in the ADSI reports vary across years. Consistent age-group categories are available only since the year 2014. Therefore, the age-wise visualisations in this dashboard include data from only from 2014 onwards.
- Cause-wise suicide data is unavailable for 2002. Minor discrepancies in the data for 1984, 2008, 2012, and 2014 mean that the total across causes does not equal the reported total number of suicides.
Citation: Keshav Desiraju India Mental Health Observatory (IMHO). Suicide Insights and Trends in India (SITI). Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy, Indian Law Society. https://cmhlp.org/imho/siti-suicide-insights-and-trends-in-india/
The team at the IMHO would like to acknowledge the efforts of our interns in the development of the SITI dashboard.
Divyanshu Yaduvanshi and Ruhi Borah: Assisted with data entry and compilation.
Madhura Khobragade: Developed and supported the creation of visualisations in Tableau.
Aman Pathak: Extracted and compiled suicide data from NCRB reports across multiple years.
Disclaimer
The data in the SITI dashboard is based on the Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India reports released by the National Crime Records Bureau. While we strive for accuracy, we do not guarantee the completeness, recency, or reliability of this information.
Licensing
The SITI dashboard is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/
