Predicting resilience determinants to counter farmers’ suicide in National Calamity devastated area of India: A binary logistic regression analysis

This paper has investigated ‘traumatized farmers’ of the Kosi flood that occurred way back on 18^th August, 2008. That flood is the only calamity in India's history officially declared as a “National Calamity”! The devastation was of such a magnitude that it took almost 2 years for Government of Bihar to finalize economic-need assessment report and to submit it to World Bank and the Project with ID: P122096, closed on June 30, 2016. A ‘true resilience’ can precisely be measured in a ‘posttraumatic condition’ or a ‘simulated-traumatic condition.’ The study was conducted with randomly selected 160 respondents from “National Calamity” affected area of India, who were later categorized as 116 non-resilient and 44 resilient respondents based on the scale value of resilience in relation to farmers’ life Scale (RFL-Scale). So, the current study attempted to exploit a binary logistic model to find the variables that affected the respondents ‘resiliency level’ of the respondents, eventually determining the ‘suicidal tendencies’ among the farmers. Initially, 25 predictive variables were taken but the final model was fitted with 8 factors. These findings indicate that the variables fairly predicted the model. Binary logistic analysis revealed the Wald statistics were significant at 1 percent level for the explanatory variables viz., Education, Spiritualism, Alternative skill (Wald value 8.061, P=0.005, [OR=42.662, 99% CI 1.416 to 1285.034)]) and Award, while variables like Innovativeness and Migration were significant at 5 percent level; experience was negatively significant at 10 percent level, whereas in contrary to a priori expectation, debt was not found to have a significant influence even at 10 percent level. The empirical model if implemented religiously, may uplift farmers mental health and avert suicidal tendencies, which will eventually promote sustainable growth and prevent socio-cultural-economic loss of the nation.