I don’t like people who criticise the government all the time. Imagine listening to their whining all day. If you are a sensitive soul like me, it could leave you depressed. Which is why I’m a strong believer in praising the government when it does something good.
Like, for instance, it just passed the most pro-farmer, pro-poor, pro-labour, pro-housewife, pro-student law ever, when it decriminalised suicide. For your information, farmers, poor daily wagers, students, and housewives are the most high-performing groups in India when it comes to suicide. Therefore, I want to thank this government on behalf of all the citizens of India for managing to do what the useless UPA could not do in its 3,650 days in power. In fact, the Mental Healthcare Bill may well be the biggest of the big bang reforms promised by every politician but delivered by only one.
Suicides and GDP
First of all, India, which has 17.5% of the world’s population, accounts for only 17% of the world’s suicides. This means that less number of people commit suicide in India per capita than they do in the rest of the world. As per government data, 1,31,666 Indians committed suicide in 2014. This grew to 1,33,623 suicides in 2015. An increase of 1,957. I’m not very good at arithmetic, but a friend of mine who is tells me this works out to an annual growth rate of a measly 1.4%. This is far below our projected GDP growth rate of 7.1%.
When we consider that, objectively speaking, suicide has tremendous scope in India, this ginormous gap between suicide growth rate and economic growth rate is utterly shameful. Most experts put the blame on the hostile regulatory environment for suicide in India, which had made it a punishable offence — an absurdity that would’ve made Camus kill himself in his grave.
Nobody can dispute that the right to life is the most fundamental human right, applicable even to those who don’t have an Aadhaar card. I think it was Kierkegaard, or maybe Karan Johar, who observed that since there is no life without death, we can’t have a right to life without a right to death as well. It took nearly 70 years, but India has finally restored dignity to this particular genre of death. But that’s just one of this law’s many outstanding merits.
By decriminalising suicide, not only has the government sent the right signal to foreign investors, it has also created a more enabling environment for an efficient India. Our country, as we all know, has too much flab when it comes to population. Much of it has no place in the future of our economy. Let’s face it: we don’t have either the time or the resources to provide education, health care, food, and jobs to every one of the 125 crore Indians.
Sometimes even the most benevolent of companies may be unable to continue paying salaries to all their employees. What do they do in such circumstances? No, they don’t fire some of their employees. They encourage them to resign of their own free will. That’s why the private sector is more efficient than the government. They get rid of excess flab.
If we want India to become a superpower, we have to become more efficient. To become more efficient, we need to get rid of the deadwood holding our economy back. With suicide no longer a crime, the stigma attached to it will disappear. And those who have neither the skills nor the qualifications nor the flexible mindset required to fit into the new economy can also disappear. For instance, farmers stuck on agriculture, workers stuck on labour rights, students stuck on obsolete ideas of freedom, activists stuck on the Constitution, etc. are now legally entitled to resign themselves from their respective lives, thereby freeing up scarce fiscal resources for productive deployment elsewhere — say, in the defence budget.
Severely stressing out
This is a path-breaking law also for acknowledging, for the first time, that “severe stress” is reason enough for anyone to kill themselves. Now, chances are, if you are a resident of India, and your residence is not Antilia, you are a victim of severe stress. I surely am. Of course, I’m personally not a big fan of suicide. But it is heart-warming to know that in a hypothetical future, if my country were going to hell in a handbasket, and if people stressed out by it opted to terminate themselves, they wouldn’t be branded as criminals for doing so. How could anyone not be grateful for that?
