ABSTRACT
This begins a set of five short chapters that present in the required detail the case that farmers’ suicides in India are a consequence of intrapersonal inequality. This chapter presents an empirical overview of farmers’ suicides in India, addressing several methodological issues along the way. This allows it to classify the states into five categories: chronic, acute, less acute, prone, and less prone. The classification brings out the regional dimension of farmers’ suicides while pointing to Kerala and Maharashtra being the states that are the most affected. This picture has the additional dimension of farmers’ suicides in Kerala being dominated by agricultural labour, while cultivator suicides are more frequent in Maharashtra.
