Astoundingly, 115 people committed suicide in Sindh’s Tharparkar district in 2021, including 68 women in the province’s desert region. This is a significant rise over the prior year. However, when it comes to suicide, which is still a crime in Pakistan with attempts subject to jail time and penalties, quantitative statistics might be challenging.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates Pakistan’s suicide rate to be 8.9 deaths per 100,000 people, which is somewhat lower than the nine deaths per 100,000 people average for the world. Pakistan does not keep national suicide statistics, however.
Despite having a population of 1.65 million, much lower than other districts in Sindh, including the seven that make up the metropolis of Karachi, Tharparkar emerged as the district with the highest number of reported cases between 2016 and 2020 in a five-year study of suicides that was completed last year by the Mental Health Authority in Sindh. The report does not include data for earlier years and only includes 79 suicide cases in Tharparkar in 2020.
Despite this, during the course of the five-year period, the district had the most cases. According to local police records, there are well over 100 suicides in 2020.
Therefore, statistics only give a tiny glimpse of suicide in Pakistan, particularly in Tharparkar, one of the least developed areas of the nation. But the locals are plenty of tales. Two streets from where she lived, less than a year after Babita passed away, a shopkeeper’s son-in-law committed suicide. Another young man, 22, who also resided across the street from him in the new communities built on top of the ancient sand dune by the new Mithi bypass, committed suicide. His 17-year-old next-door neighbor similarly committed suicide a month later.
A businessman whispered the suicide death of a friend’s child in an older section of Mithi. A young father in the town of Chachro, which is close to the Indian border, tossed his three sons, who were then ages four, three, and three months, into an empty well before diving in after them. The stories have a beginning, but they don’t have an end. One mother, whose grown son committed suicide three years prior, recalled only one occurrence from her childhood. She remembered just one episode from when she was younger, about a woman in Mithi who flung herself into a well.
When she was a child, the incidents were uncommon enough to make each one stand out as a unique tale. However, nowadays it is routine to hear about one every other week and to see images of bodies going viral on Facebook and WhatsApp.
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The woman was unambiguous when asked if she knew when this started. They only started learning about all these deaths about seven or eight years ago.
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