In demand of Necrology

On matters pertaining to necrology, it seems we are reticent in times of peace, resigned, to death's inevitability. It is death's untimeliness, when it does occur –and particularly the tragic and voluptuous nature of it that moves us and calls us to question: How many died? What were the circumstances of their death? And why, why? 1127 dead in Savar. 2996 during 9/11. Tazreen garments, 137? The Bangladesh famine of 1974: 1.5 million? Darfur? And so on.

First, there is the fallacy in numbers. Utsa Patnaik's probing account of famine deaths in China following the Great Leap forward illustrates the point well: not only were the number of deaths counted but also the number of unborn children who could have been born! Such blatant politicisation of numbers we all know too well.

But in the distance that falls between tragedies such as these, the gaps, when life (seemingly) prevails over death, do the dead have nothing to teach us? Why only the sporadic interest?

Recall that every year we are consumed with numbers of a different kind, the kind that tell us what we have produced, how much our countries have grown, and whether prices have gone up or down and by how much. GDP is calculated every year, prices every month. Even the world's richest are identified every year, imagine.

Poverty — we are less interested in but we still care, only less frequently, as they are indeed alive though poor. So we debate over what the poverty line should be and derive the number of taka it will take to have command over certain basic commodities. How many poor in Bangladesh who consume fewer than 1805 kilocalories a day, the alleged minimum energy requirement for Bangladesh below which the poor are considered the "hardcore poor"? But it is all too tiresome a task so we choose not to recount, year after year. Instead, we adjust our estimates based on prices, based on what we believe the poor are consuming. Roughly every five years, reports are churned out that inform us about the state of poverty. Poverty gaps are estimated that tell us how poor the poor actually are as a distance from the poverty line. There is even research on chronic poverty that tells us how long the poor have been poor and their movements above and below the poverty line. And reports that tell us how much more income we earn in comparison to others. We track state budgets demanding accountability. Then the slew of indices – the Human Development Index, the Human Poverty Index, even the Gross Happiness Index that measure the changes of our lived experience – our progressions and regressions in well-being.

But why no national, yearly account of the dead? Why can we not ask the state every year: Who dies on a yearly basis and why? Which income groups do they come from? Are there disproportionate numbers of the dead who belong to a particular region or class or who die during a particular season? Do we know how many have died during the Monga, the lean season that recurs every year in the northwestern districts of Bangladesh? If we can state that a stipulated number of kilocalories a day is required for survival and count the poor based on such a number, how do we account for those who have died, who have not survived, when we have only counted the living? How easy it is to fall through the cracks unnoticed! Ravi Kanbur's insightful question is relevant here: If the incidence of poverty goes down because the poor die at a faster rate than the non-poor, does this count as a legitimate decrease in poverty?

A bdnews24.com report headline reads:

Nilphamari, October 27, 2005 – Old man starved to death identified: None to take relief, there's no Monga says UNO

It cannot be solely the task of journalists and NGOs to track starvation deaths and farmer suicides. Official accounts of the dead appear to only be in aggregate and sectoral terms which means crude death rates are calculated as are infant and maternal mortality rates. Our civil registration systems are ridden with ennui as they cannot even track births completely, let alone deaths. Some disaggregated data does exist but based on age and gender, even race in specific contexts, but not class, income or expenditure. Why take all the trouble to determine minimum poverty lines and energy requirements then?

Thus, though we've made some efforts in tracking the living, our dead we forget, in time, or even instantaneously. In turn, we have no sure way of measuring the inequality that exists in death as it does in life.

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Mausumi Mahapatro is a Ph.D. student in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.