Voices Anand Neelakantan Utkarsh Amitabh Ravi Shankar Dr Alka Pande Dr Ramya Alakkal Swami Sukhabodhananda MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI june 14 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 What is the Price of a Life in India? Zero A name becomes a number, a life becomes a statistic, as countless people disappear into India’s daily ledger of loss H Sahil Dhaneshra was killed when an by a 17-year-old fatal impact SUV drivenrammed into his lost control and bike By ravi shankar is name was Sahil Dhaneshra. He was 23 years old when an SUV allegedly driven by a 17-year, old boy, lost control and smashed into his motorcycle, killing him. Her name was Twisha Sharma. She was 31 years old, a model and beauty pageant winner. She was found hanging in her matrimonial home. Her mother-in-law, former judge Giribala Singh, and her husband, Samarth, were jailed on charges of dowry death, cruelty by husband, and abetment to suicide. His name was Shahzad Ali. He was a 25-year-old homeless house painter. He was run over and killed by a speeding black car. CCTV cameras failed to capture the vehicle that struck him. His name was Aditya. He was six years old. He was killed by a pack of stray dogs. His name was Rinku. He was 16 years old and belonged to a community traditionally forced into manual scavenging. He died trying to rescue his father, who had suffocated in a pit full of human excreta after inhaling toxic fumes. His name was Rohit Lal. He was 29 years old. He died of a massive heart attack after taking a fatal dose of counterfeit medicine. Fourteen men, their names unreported, died after consuming spurious liquor in Maharashtra. Her name was Sadim Maila. She was 41 years old. She was found gang-raped and murdered in a vegetable garden in a village in Manipur. Thousands of such names disappear every day in India, swallowed by the darkness of anonymous despair. Together, they—and countless others like them—illustrate a simple truth about daily life in India: life is cheap. 21 Malviya Nagar fire, Delhi, June 3, 2026 Twenty-one people died in a budget hotel in a crowded locality which had no fire clearance. It had windowless basement rooms, illegal partitions, the emergency exit was locked. The building was licensed for six rooms but was operating 25. fire trap The Malviya Nagar fire killed 21 people after flames tore through a hotel, trapping guests inside 74 Thane building collapse, April 2013 An unsanctioned eight-storeyed residential building constructed in a short span of just six weeks collapsed, claiming the lives of 74 people; mostly daily-wage labourers and their children. 2,385 Pothole deaths, 2024 The number of Indians killed by potholes in 2024 alone, went up by 53 per cent over five years according to a data tabled in Parliament by the government itself. 28/day Farmer suicides, 2024 In 2024, one farmer or agricultural labourer committed suicide every hour, says the NCRB, amounting to 10,546 deaths in a single year. Since 1995, the cumulative toll exceeds 3,94,000, a number larger than the population of many Indian districts. barren fields Since 1995, the cumulative toll of farmer suicides exceeds 3,94,000 6,450 Dowry deaths, 2022 In 2024 alone, 5,737 women were killed in dowry-related deaths which is about 17 deaths per day The annual number of such . murders across India is over 5,700. Only 6.8 per cent of cases across the category of domestic violence against women ever complete a trial. Only 15.5 per cent of these result in conviction. 26 Mizoram railway bridge collapse, August 2023 Twenty-six immigrant labourers, who were sleeping inside the site perimeter of the bridge because there was nowhere else to sleep, died when the under-construction railway bridge collapsed. toxic brew Deaths from spurious liquor continue to claim dozens of lives across India each year So many deaths. So many causes. Different states, different years. Yet a single logic connects them all: the administrative cost of preventing a death is often higher than the cost of allowing it to happen. Life, then, has a price. And that price is cheap. This is not merely a story of poverty or corruption. Above all, it is an indictment of governance. Independent India eliminated the spectre of mass famine through policy interventions that ensured food reached those who needed it. The Bengal Famine of 1943—when an estimated three million people died because policy denied them access to food—would not be repeated. But while the famine ended, the logic behind it survived. The colonial state treated Indian lives as expendable, relief as a cost, and preventable deaths as an acceptable administrative outcome. That logic endured after Independence. It simply found new ways to kill. The Arithmetic of Disposability The Numbers the Government Tabled Itself Let us begin with roads, perhaps the most democratic form of preventable death. India records around 1.68 lakh road deaths each year—one of the highest tolls in the world. Between 2020 and 2024, 9,438 people died after falling into potholes, with 2,385 deaths in 2024 alone. In Bengaluru, India’s celebrated technology capital, 20 people died in 19 separate incidents involving potholes, electrocution, broken footpaths, and other civic failures in 2023. It’s not about poverty It’s about a city that generates billions in wealth but cannot . maintain a road. Nor are roads the only danger. Fires kill around 27,000 people annually, building collapses claim five to seven lives a day, farmer suicides took 10,546 lives in 2024, and dowry-related murders continue to claim thousands of women every year. These figures come from government records, parliamentary replies, and NCRB reports. They are published, debated, and mourned. Yet, almost without exception, little changes. Historical Roots Two Centuries of Teaching the State That Indian Lives Are Overhead India did not arrive at this condition overnight. Its roots lie in the colonial state, which often weighed Indian lives against revenue and imperial priorities. The clearest example was famine: more than 30 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines under British rule. As Amartya Sen observed, famine is less about food scarcity than about people losing the means and political power to access food. Independence ended famine on that scale but not entirely the administrative culture that treats human life as a variable in a bureaucratic calculation. Partition deepened this legacy The . violence of 1947 killed roughly 2,00,000 people, yet accountability remained limited. A pattern emerged that would recur repeatedly: mass death acknowledged, recorded, and ultimately absorbed into official memory with few consequences. The Mechanism How Impunity is Organised There are four institutional mechanisms that enable preventable deaths in contemporary India: the corruption of inspection, the insulation of officials from consequences, the glacial pace of justice, and the absence of the poor from political accountability . The most visible is the corruption of inspection. In Bengaluru’s civic body a retired judge remarked that corruption “happens at every level , of government and more so in the BBMP” and has done so for decades. In Hyderabad’s municipal corporation, Anti-Corruption Bureau investigators found that officials routinely charged `50,000-`1 lakh per floor to approve illegal construction. In Mumbai, a BMC officer was arrested in 2024 while collecting `75 lakh as the first installment of a `2-crore bribe to overlook two illegal floors in Ghatkopar. As a result, the cost of bribing officials to construct an illegal five-storey building is often only a small fraction of its eventual market value and can be recovered quickly through sales or rent. Municipal inspectors earn a fraction of the value of the permissions they control, creating powerful incentives for corruption. As a result, an efficient informal market for illegal clearances has emerged. This system is reinforced by the near-total insulation of officials from accountability When buildings collapse or fires kill residents, . 53% higher than five years earlier, was the number of Indians killed in pothole-related road accidents in 2024 10,546 farmer and agricultural labourer suicides were recorded in 2024, averaging roughly one death every hour, according to NCRB data 5,737 women lost their lives in dowry-related deaths in 2024 alone, equivalent to about 17 deaths every day 1.68 lakh people die on Indian roads each year, accounting for nearly 11% of all road fatalities worldwide 27,000 annual fire-related deaths are recorded across more than 1.6 lakh incidents, with women comprising 66% of the victims 5-7 people die every day in building collapses; between 2001 and 2015, such incidents claimed 38,363 lives in 37,514 cases Turn to page 2