His 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.
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.
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.
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 Rs 50,000- Rs 1 lakh per floor to approve illegal construction. In Mumbai, a BMC officer was arrested in 2024 while collecting Rs 75 lakh as the first installment of a Rs 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, builders and property owners may face arrest, but the municipal inspectors, fire officers, and licensing authorities whose negligence enabled the violations rarely suffer consequences.
Judicial delays further weaken deterrence. With more than 50 million cases pending in Indian courts, prosecutions arising from building collapses, fire disasters, and similar tragedies can take a decade or longer to conclude. By the time judgments are delivered, public attention has faded. Even public spending meant to support vulnerable citizens is frequently diverted. In 2017, for example, Rs 35,000 crore in farm subsidies reportedly flowed to entities based in New Delhi and Chandigarh—cities with virtually no farming activity—while in Maharashtra, around 60 per cent of government farm loans and subsidies were disbursed to entities in Mumbai rather than to farmers themselves.
The Body That Moves for Work
Migrant Labour and the Geography of Expendability
India has roughly 400 million internal migrants, the largest such population in the world. They travel from Bihar to Delhi, Jharkhand to Goa, Chhattisgarh to Mumbai, and Andhra Pradesh to Bengaluru in search of work. They build cities, dig roads, pour concrete, and staff restaurants. In the political economy, they remain what they were under colonial rule: essential, cheap, and disposable.
In April 2025, a dumper truck ran over a construction worker and his three children as they slept inside an under-construction railway substation in Prayagraj. All four died. The same month, an 18-month-old boy, Ronak Kanoje, drowned in a water-filled pit at a construction site in Nashik. His migrant parents from Bihar were having lunch nearby. The Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) Act, 1996 mandates welfare measures including insurance, housing, schooling, and creches at larger construction sites. In practice, enforcement is weak. In 2023, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour concluded that India was unlikely to meet its commitment to eliminate child labour by 2025, despite having formally endorsed that goal. No official accepted responsibility.
The migrant worker’s position in the city is politically precarious. He is often unregistered, lacks local voting rights, and carries little electoral weight for the constituency in which he works. His welfare board exists on paper, funds accumulate in his name, but his interests rarely influence political calculations. His death does not affect elections, and so the system treats it as a statistic rather than a failure.
The Woman in the Statistics
Dowry, Fire, and the Landscape of Disposable Lives
Of the 27,000 Indians who die in fires each year, about two-thirds are women—reflecting the dangers of kerosene stoves, synthetic clothing, and unsafe cooking environments. Dowry-related violence remains a major contributor: between 2017 and 2022, around 7,000 women were killed annually in dowry deaths. Although Section 304B of the IPC has prescribed severe penalties since 1986, conviction rates have remained stubbornly low. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan account for nearly 65 per cent of all such deaths; in Uttar Pradesh alone, 2,218 dowry deaths were reported in 2022, with most cases unresolved after six months.
The problem is compounded by systematic undercounting. Women who die by suicide after dowry harassment are often recorded under broader categories such as homemaker suicides, obscuring the true scale of the crisis. As one analysis of NCRB data concluded: for every 100 women killed through domestic violence, roughly one perpetrator is convicted.
The Philosophical Inheritance
Why the Culture of Impunity Persists
Bengaluru is one of Asia’s wealthiest technology hubs, yet its roads remain deadly—not for lack of funds, but because maintenance budgets are routinely siphoned off through contractor-official networks. Likewise, the 2023 Samruddhi Expressway bus fire in Maharashtra, which killed 26 people, did not stem from underinvestment. The Rs 55,000-crore highway was a flagship project. The causes were regulatory failure: an unlicensed operator and an intoxicated driver. The driver was jailed; the institutions that enabled the disaster largely escaped accountability.
Economic liberalisation accelerated urbanisation and enriched India, but it also strengthened the nexus between politicians, regulators, and real-estate interests. The consequences are borne by ordinary citizens—in unsafe buildings, on poorly regulated buses, and on roads repaired with substandard materials. The aftermath is predictable: condolences, compensation, inquiries, the arrest of a convenient private actor, and then silence.
The system endures because the cost of inaction remains lower than the cost of reform.
A World of Difference
The Rich Man’s Road and the Poor Man’s Pavement
On September 28, 2002, Salman Khan’s SUV struck a group of homeless men sleeping on a Mumbai pavement, killing one and injuring four. After 13 years of litigation, he was acquitted when prosecutors failed to prove he was driving. Ravindra Patil, the constable who identified Khan as the driver, died in poverty after years defending his testimony. The pattern resurfaced in 2024 when Vedant Agarwal, the 17-year-old son of a wealthy Pune builder, allegedly killed two IT professionals while driving a Porsche after drinking. He was initially granted bail and ordered to write a 300-word essay on road safety. Investigators later alleged attempts to shift blame and tamper with blood samples.
Infrastructure disasters follow the same script. After the 2022 Morbi bridge collapse, Oreva officials called it an “act of God”. While lower-level employees faced arrest, owner Jaysukh Patel secured bail, and in 2025 the Gujarat High Court stayed the framing of charges against him. In Bihar, the Agwani-Sultanganj bridge over the Ganga collapsed three times despite warnings from an IIT Roorkee report, yet the contractor was not blacklisted. In July 2025, the Gambhira Bridge collapse in Gujarat killed 22 people, with preliminary findings pointing to structural failure and poor maintenance.
In January 2026, 27-year-old software engineer Yuvraj Mehta drowned after his SUV plunged into a water-filled excavation pit at a Noida construction site. Trapped on the roof of his vehicle, he repeatedly called for help before dying; investigators later cited inadequate barricading and safety measures. The Jabalpur boat tragedy of April 2026 exposed similar failures. A tourist boat on the Bargi Dam reservoir capsized during a storm, killing at least 13 people. Survivors alleged inadequate access to life jackets and delays in emergency response.
The pattern is unmistakable: people die, reports are commissioned, inquiries announced, and lower-level actors prosecuted. Yet accountability rarely reaches those with real power.
Death by Dog
When Animal Rights Outweigh Human Lives
In north Bengaluru in February 2025, Nagaraju, a 22-year-old construction labourer from Raichur, was mauled to death by what investigators believe was a pack of stray dogs. It was the third body found within a hundred metres of the same plot in a year. In Bhopal in 2024, a seven-month-old infant sleeping beside his mother was carried off and killed. In Hyderabad in 2023, four-year-old Pradeep was mauled while accompanying his father, a security guard, to work. In 2011, on Bengaluru’s outskirts, dogs entered a doorless shanty where migrant workers from Odisha were sleeping, dragged away 18-month-old Prashant, and killed him.
India has an estimated 62 million stray dogs, the largest such population in the world. In 2024, authorities recorded 3.7 million dog-bite incidents. Delhi alone reported more than 25,000 cases. In August 2025, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the crisis and ordered municipalities to fence schools, hospitals, and other public spaces, and move strays to shelters. Animal welfare groups challenged the order, arguing that it conflicted with rules requiring sterilisation, vaccination, and return of community dogs to their territories. A larger bench modified the directive. The litigation continued; the dogs remained on the streets.
The Animal Birth Control programme has existed since 2001, yet municipalities routinely underfund it, miss sterilisation targets, and report questionable figures. The burden falls overwhelmingly on those with the fewest protections: migrant workers sleeping in temporary settlements, residents of low-income neighbourhoods, and people whose lives are spent in public spaces.
The Useful Dead
Communal Violence and the Political Economy of Riots
In the last week of February 2020, northeast Delhi burned for three days, leaving at least 53 people dead in violence later described by the Delhi Minorities Commission as “planned and targeted.” Mobs armed with petrol bombs, iron rods, gas cylinders, and firearms moved through neighbourhoods such as Jaffrabad, Mustafabad, and Maujpur. As retired IPS officer Vibhuti Narain Rai noted, communal riots rarely continue for long without state acquiescence.
The Delhi riots reflected a broader pattern in which communal polarisation is mobilised for political ends, while the poor and minorities bear the greatest costs. Justice is often delayed for decades: convictions for the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom began only in 2018. Between 2014 and 2023, India recorded 189 lynching cases with a conviction rate of just 10 per cent. A 2025 policing survey found that over half of police personnel partially or fully justified mob violence, highlighting a culture of impunity that leaves victims with little hope of timely justice.
Into the Hole
The Manhole, the Septic Tank, and the Caste of Dehumanisation
On February 2, 2025, two sanitation workers died cleaning a sewer in Narela, Delhi, after being sent into a toxic pit without protective equipment. Days later, three workers from Murshidabad were killed on a Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority project when a pipe burst and swept them into a manhole while clearing a clogged drain. Such deaths are routine. Between 2014 and 2025, at least 859 sanitation workers died cleaning sewers and septic tanks in India—roughly one death every five days. Government data recorded 377 deaths between 2019 and 2023 alone, while the Safai Karmachari Andolan counted 116 deaths in 2024 compared with the government's 54. In Delhi, more than 72 workers died cleaning sewers between 2013 and 2024, according to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis.
Manual scavenging and human entry into sewers and septic tanks have been illegal since the 2013 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act. The Supreme Court reiterated a complete ban in major metropolitan areas in January 2025, yet at least 20 more sewer-cleaning deaths were reported by April. The victims are overwhelmingly Dalit men from communities historically assigned sanitation work. The NAMASTE scheme, launched in 2023–24 to mechanise sanitation and register workers, reflects policy intent, but implementation remains weak. Between 2001 and 2022, only two cases under the Manual Scavengers Act reached trial, both in Karnataka in 2015, and only one resulted in a conviction.
The Catastrophic Care
The Uninsured Body and the Public Hospital
India has some of the finest private hospitals in the world. Doctors at Apollo, Fortis, and Narayana Health perform complex surgeries and transplants at a fraction of Western costs, and India supplies roughly 40 per cent of the world’s generic medicines. Yet for most Indians, quality healthcare remains difficult to access.
A 2023 National Insurance Academy report found that 73 per cent of Indians lacked health insurance. Even among those covered by schemes such as Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY, access is uneven: a 2022-23 survey found that only 35 per cent of insured patients were able to use the scheme when hospitalised. Delayed reimbursements have driven hundreds of empanelled hospitals out of the programme, while fraud and unpaid government dues have further weakened its effectiveness.
India spends just 1.3 per cent of GDP on public health—among the lowest rates globally. Out-of-pocket payments still account for nearly half of all health expenditure. The consequences go beyond affordability. The deaths of children in Gambia, Indonesia, and Uzbekistan from contaminated Indian-made cough syrups exposed serious regulatory failures. Within India, contaminated medicines, unsafe hospital practices, and medical negligence rarely lead to meaningful accountability because pursuing legal remedies requires time, money, and access that most families lack.
Jal, Jangal, Jameen
The Adivasi, the Contractor, and the Cost of the Mine
India’s mineral wealth—iron ore, bauxite, coal, graphite and lithium—is concentrated in regions long inhabited by Adivasi communities: Bastar, the Jharkhand plateau, the Odisha hills and the forests of Andhra Pradesh. This has made them frequent casualties of India’s development model.
In January 2006, police opened fire on Adivasis protesting land acquisition for a proposed Tata Steel plant at Kalinga Nagar, Odisha, killing 12. Families kept the bodies on the highway for days, refusing cremation until their demands were heard. The Fifth Schedule, PESA and the Forest Rights Act formally protect Adivasi land and require community consent for acquisition. In practice, these safeguards are often circumvented through legal manoeuvring, bureaucratic pressure and, when resistance persists, security operations. In Bastar, community groups have alleged that unarmed villagers, including children, have been killed during anti-Naxal campaigns. The Moolvasi Bachao Manch, which opposed displacement, was banned in 2024, and its president arrested under the UAPA in 2025.
The average annual income of an Adivasi household in Chhattisgarh was ₹53,610 in 2022—less than half the national agricultural household average. Land is often their only productive asset. Once lost, families are pushed into chronic vulnerability with little institutional support. The pattern is consistent: the poor bear the costs, the powerful capture the gains, and the state frequently aligns with the latter.
The Way Ahead
How the Country Can be a Better Place
The remedies are well known. Publicly disclose independent fire and structural audits, tie licence renewals to compliance, impose criminal liability on officials whose negligence causes deaths, strengthen whistleblower protections, fast-track cases involving preventable mass fatalities, make voter registration portable for migrant workers, digitise building approvals, and independently audit welfare funds. These measures have been recommended repeatedly after disasters from Kalinga Nagar to Mundka, Buldhana and Malviya Nagar. The obstacle is not knowledge but implementation.
Somewhere in India this morning, a building inspector is receiving a consideration for a floor that does not exist on any approved plan. Somewhere, a fire officer is accepting a payment for a visit he will not make. Somewhere, a farmer is calculating that his family will receive more from a government compensation scheme than from his next harvest. Somewhere, a young woman is being told that the amount her family provided at marriage was insufficient. Somewhere, a child of a migrant construction worker is playing near a water-filled pit.
The state knows. The data is in the reports it publishes every year. The question India has not yet answered either in policy, in law, or in the political culture that ultimately determines is what is permitted to continue. And whether the privileged establishment considers these deaths to be problems, or simply the price of how things are.