December 14, 2024 06:13 (IST)
Follow us:
facebook-white sharing button
twitter-white sharing button
instagram-white sharing button
youtube-white sharing button
Bengaluru techie suicide: Karnataka Police issues summons to wife Nikita, her family members | French President Macron appoints centrist leader Francois Bayrou as new Prime Minister | Congress always prioritised personal interest over Constitution: Rajnath Singh | Jaishankar calls attack on Hindus in Bangladesh 'a source of concern' | Allu Arjun arrested over woman's death in stampede during Pushpa 2 premiere show | RBI receives bomb threat in Russian language, case filed | UP teenager kills mother, lives with body for 5 days | At least six people including a child killed in Tamil Nadu hospital fire | Amid Atul Subhash row, SC says mere harassment is not enough to prove abetment to suicide | India's D Gukesh becomes youngest ever world champion in chess
Pakistan Suicide
Image Credit: Pixabay

Pakistan's desert region witnessing spike in suicide cases, experts believe poverty driven by climate change as reason behind it

| @indiablooms | Apr 20, 2021, at 12:38 am

Islamabad: At least 143 people take own lives in Thar desert’s Tharparkar, Umerkot districts between 2016, 2020, marking a massive spike oin suicide cases in the region.

Extreme weather patterns are frequent threat, major cause of poverty pushing people to suicide, Arab News reported.

The UN Development Program’s Multidimensional Poverty Index for Pakistan reported that 87 percent of the population in Thar lived in poverty. And climate change was now pushing locals into more deprivation, reports the newspaper.

Between 2016 to 2020, the Sindh Mental Health Authority (SMHA), an arm of the provincial government, said 767 suicides were recorded in Sindh, out of which the highest number, 79 cases, occurred in Tharparkar district in the Thar desert and another 64 cases were reported in the desert’s Umerkot district, the newspaper reported.

With a total of 143 cases registered in Thar, one in every five suicides in Sindh occurs in the desert region, authority officials told Arab News.

The non-governmental organization, the Association for Water, Applied Education, and Renewable Energy (Aware), has , however, put total deaths by suicide in Thar at 348 between 2016 and 2020.

“With every passing day, suicide cases are rising in the desert,” Ali Akbar Rahimoo, Aware’s executive director, told Arab News.

Maryam Shabbir, a researcher at the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute, told Arab News that climate-change-driven poverty was a new addition to the impoverished region’s problems, with “extreme weather patterns” increasing people’s vulnerability.

“It could be handled through pre-policy making. If this is not addressed, it could turn into a political, social, and economic disaster of international scale,” she said.

Support Our Journalism

We cannot do without you.. your contribution supports unbiased journalism

IBNS is not driven by any ism- not wokeism, not racism, not skewed secularism, not hyper right-wing or left liberal ideals, nor by any hardline religious beliefs or hyper nationalism. We want to serve you good old objective news, as they are. We do not judge or preach. We let people decide for themselves. We only try to present factual and well-sourced news.

Support objective journalism for a small contribution.
Related Images
Xi Jinping, Putin in Russia Mar 22, 2023, at 08:26 pm