The Hindu : It is poverty, not cold

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 25, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

It is poverty, not cold

By V. Krishna Ananth

Amid reports of an imminent war in the Persian Gulf and the mutual expulsions of diplomatic personnel by India and Pakistan, the deaths across the northern Indian States caught in the cold wave, have hardly got the media attention they deserved.

Though the number of people reported dead is more than 700, conventional wisdom would convince anyone that the actual number of fatalities would be a lot more.

True, a cold wave of such intensity is not a new phenomenon in the world and there are places where the mercury dips several degrees below zero.

Though several times bitter than what is being experienced in India, it does not kill people any longer in North America and Europe. Similarly it does not kill all the people living in Delhi and its environs.

Instead, the truth is plain and simple. That people do not die due to the cold as such, but because they are poor and cannot afford the protective clothing. At least most of those reported dead are those who do not have a place to spend the nights without having to expose their body to the harsh weather; those whose daily diet does not contain enough calories to keep them warm when the mercury dips; those who cannot afford the medicines when their lungs get infected - pneumonia - by a bacterium that strikes after the virus that causes common cold weakens the body considerably.

This process - anti-genic shifts - takes place in such cold climes and affects those whose immune systems are already weakened due to malnutrition.

In this sense, the deaths should fall in the same category of loss of lives due to an inadequate healthcare system or malnutrition or infant mortality and hence caused due to an insensitive political setup.

The deaths during this winter, hence, is only a pointer to the State failing to ensure the provisions of Article 21 - the right to life - guaranteed by the Constitution. Indeed, the toll and the choice of words by the media, knowingly or otherwise, presenting the deaths as having caused by the cold wave (rather than driving home the point that it is poverty) is also reflective of the yawning gap between the concerns of the articulate sections in society and the ordinary people.

There were instances when the civil society institutions (consisting of the articulate sections) could help widen the scope of Article 21 of the Constitution when the Supreme Court interpreted that the right to life did not mean mere animal existence (Olga Tellis vs Bombay Municipal Corporation or the Pavement Dwellers case) and that it also included the right to livelihood and decreed that the State was bound to ensure this.

The death of so many men, women and children, indeed, warrants invoking the provisions of writ jurisdiction in the Constitution as was done in the Pavement Dwellers case.

For this, it is necessary to recognise that they died because they were not protected adequately from the cold.

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