File talk:Total and farmers suicide rate per 100000 in India, time trend.png

incorrect translation of data between graph forms

Hi. I just read through the original study from which you derived this graph. I think you may have misinterpreted the data in a big way. The original graph in Gruèrea & Sengupta (2011) is Figure 1, which shows the cumulative number of suicides (~100k for all of India, ~20k for farmers), not the rate of suicide per 100,000 people-year. It appears that you simply divided both the 100k and 20k numbers by the population of india and multiplied by 100k to get the rates in your graph. This is not a correct method. When finding the rate of death in a subpopulation, such as for farmers, you would divide by the total number of farmers. For the year 2011 this was estimated (by Times of India) to be 262 million cultivators (118 million) and ag laborers (144 million). Gruèrea & Sengupta (2011) do not distinguish between cultivators and ag labor, and do not give a total occupation population for the subgroup that they are studying -- which is rather careless of them to leave that out. Regardless, to make your graph, you should have divided the ~20k farmer suicide number by either 262 million or 118 million and then multiplied by 100k. That would yield, respectively, a rate of ~8 suicides per 100k cultivators and ag laborers, or ~17 suicides per 100k cultivators only. As you can see, there are multiple sources of error and ambiguity at play here, but we can be sure that farmer suicides in India are at least 8 if not 17 per 100k, and not below 2 per 100k, as your chart suggests.

Tarnas (talk) 00:01, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The chart is simply a plot of the data from a table in the peer reviewed paper paper, without any math. You are doing unacceptable original research here, when you start lecturing "which is rather careless of them..." See wikipedia's original research policy.

You can verify the data, more easily, in Table 3 in this paper, on page 6, by the same authors. M Tracy Hunter (talk) 15:33, 9 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, the document you are linking to is Gruère and Sengupta 2008, not Gruère and Sengupta 2011. Their 2008 draft is not peer reviewed. Their 2011 article is, and does not contain the data that you transcribed into this graph. The data in your graph is false. Gruère and Sengupta 2008 lists Sainath 2007a as the source of their tabular data that you have used in this image. If you read Sainath 2007a [1] you will find that it does not contain the tabular data that Gruère and Sengupta 2008 published, and that in fact Sainath 2007a only cited a single farmer suicide rate, for 2001, at 12.9 farmer suicides per 100k farmers, for India as a nation -- not 1.60/100k, a miscalculated number that is in your chart. Sorry that this discussion is spanning the wiki article, wiki image entry, and wiki commons talk page, it's confusing. But you need to understand that your image is not from Gruère and Sengupta 2011, it's from Gruère and Sengupta 2008, and they are very different documents. Tarnas (talk) 20:11, 30 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]