It's showing a small bump in 2004 after Bt cotton was first introduced, and a precipitous drop in suicides in 2006, when Bt cotton had more wide-spread adoption.
Thanks, Alexa. I actually didn't look much at the graph, one way or another. My point was simply that in a country as large as India (or even not nearly as large), one should be looking at at local rates (and local factors of potential causality) not simply national averages, if ones wants to make heads or tails of a complex set of claims like these.
Your conclusion ("was likely unrelated") differs with what the authors of that study put forth in their abstract, BTW.
Point being, the story people "pushing" isn't about the overall rate of farmer suicides in the world's second most populous country - but about the rates in specific regions, and how those rates have changed in recent years, in response to specific events.
Your point is perfectly valid, and shouldn't have been downvoted.
But as a footnote, the sibling comment here happens to also be correct: like any truly effective propaganda outlet, RT leverages a mix of largely legitimate / mundane news along with a certain proportion of fake or distorted news.
But for the sake of simplicity it's best to stop citing RT or feeding it attention of any other form, altogether.
The one parent of mine who did have a degree got theirs in a STEM field, so exposure to the parents of some friends who had PhDs in the humanities (with books floor-to-ceiling, reading newspapers in languages with alphabets I had neither seen nor dreamt of -- this was pre-internet, and "middle America", to a first-order approximation, mind you) was quite an eye-opener. It was like they were just on different plane, intellectually (though also very grounded, and nothing at all like the detached, academic stereotype).
I can imagine it might have mattered even more if they were math or science PhDs -- again, this was pre-internet; so I never heard of the International Math Olympiads until my later years of college, actually (way past the age when it would have mattered).
I ended up not going into academia, but it was a serious consideration for quite a while (and yes, the early role models definitely helped).
I recall in my younger (pre-college) days benefiting substantially from rubbing shoulders with kids whose parents were academics (not at any big-name schools -- just regular, decent-enough state universities), and the substantial cross-pollination effect that had on my own development. And the idea that I myself, just might, if I really worked my ass off, be able to pursue their path -- was actually really incredibly inspiring.
The wholesale evisceration of this group of professionals, as a class, as we have witnessed in the U.S. -- combined with the near-total demolishng of any genuine sense of hope for anyone seriously considering a career path in academia (even the best and brightest) -- cannot possibly bode well for society.
