India, Nov. 4 -- Between 2001 and 2022, more than 70,000 farmers killed themselves in Maharashtra. That works out to close to nine farmers per day, every day, for two decades. India as a whole accounts for roughly a third of all farmer suicides recorded globally. Maharashtra, for most of those years, accounts for a third of India's.

These are National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) numbers. The data has gaps and definitional problems, and some researchers think it undercounts. But nobody thinks it overcounts. What the numbers show, even conservatively, is a sustained catastrophe in one of India's richest states.

One definitional point matters for reading every number that follows. Before 2014, NCRB reported a single farm-sector category th...