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| January 4, 2003 | Saturday | Shawwal 30, 1423 |
Suicides on the rise
FAISALABAD, Jan 3: At least 87 people committed suicides owing to different reasons throughout the district during the year 2002, surpassing all the previous records.
According to the figures provided by police about the incidents of heinous crimes and other incidents, 87 people, including 29 women and girls, took their lives for financial constraints, unemployment, marriage dispute and variety of other reasons.
Out of all, 34 people, including 13 girls, ended their lives due to refusal of their parents to arrange their marriages with their lovers. As many as 29 youths preferred to commit suicide instead of living as jobless while 24 girls and boys committed suicide due to domestic disputes.
Police record revealed that 24 people ended their lives by hanging themselves with ropes, 36 by taking poison and 27 by shooting themselves.
The worrying aspect is that the people who committed suicide during the last one year is the highest of all previous years.
In 1998, only 26 people took their lives while the figure touched to 39 in 1999. During the previous year, police record claimed, 42 people committed suicide due to different problems.
Police did not register about 100 incidents of hanging, burning and firing in which youngsters, labourers, teenagers and girls ended their lives due to various reasons. In some cases, police itself were involved in directing their relatives to keep the matter ‘secret’.
When contacted, a senior police officer said that if a person committed suicide, it was not considered an offence. The police just carried out legal proceedings under section 174 CrPC and handed the body over to their relatives even without conducting postmortem, he said.
A psychiatrist opines that the trend of suicide should be taken as a serious indicator of frustration and dejection in society. It seems the people have lost confidence in the system.
He says the rise in the number of suicide incidence was alarming and should be controlled. The real problems of the people, which force them to undergo depression and frustration, must be addressed, he adds.
DEMANDED: The local Prize Bond Dealers Association has demanded that the government should issue licenses to genuine dealers of prize bonds identical to permits of foreign currency dealers.
In a statement here on Friday, Association president Mirza Shaukat Baig and senior vice-president Muslim Askari said there should be no hurdle in issuing the licenses to prize bond dealers for they were transacting business just for petty commissions.
They said thousands of people would become jobless if the government tried to frame some law of banning the prize bond sale in the open market. In addition, they claimed the government would also sustain a huge financial loss due to the low sale of prize bonds in scheduled banks.
Scores of families, including pensioners and old people, were getting handsome profit from this business, they said.
They apprehended that the implementation on the proposals of the Justice and Peace Committee in this regard would open another Pandora and create innumerable problems for the small prize bond dealers.
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