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If you want your family to get ten lakh rupees from the Tamil Nadu government, you'd better make sure you die in a tragedy that makes the national news cycle.
I reckon that sounds cold. But look at the math.
In Kallakurichi, fifty-six people (mostly daily wage labourers, men who spent their lives carrying sacks or digging ditches for three hundred rupees a day) drank bootleg arrack laced with methanol. They died in government hospital wards, their eyes burning, their kidneys shutting down one by one. It was a horrific way to go. Within forty-eight hours, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin was on camera announcing ten lakh rupees for the family of every deceased person, and fifty thousand rupees for everyone lying in a hospital bed.
Ten lakh rupees. For a family in Karunapuram colony where the monthly income rarely touches eight thousand, that is more money than they would see in a decade of breaking stone.
Now, step across the district border.
A man rides his TVS XL Super back from the fields near Salem. It’s 8 PM. The State Highways Department dug a trench across the asphalt three weeks ago to lay a culvert, forgot to put up a red reflector, and didn't bother to paint the dirt mound. The man hits the trench, flies over the handlebars, snaps his spine on the rim of a concrete pipe, and dies in the ditch.
Unless his family manages to establish government negligence in court or spend years fighting a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal case, they don't automatically get a ten-lakh-rupee cheque handed to them by a minister. There is no instant executive press release for him. His wife will spend months carrying petitions to the Collectorate on Monday mornings, filing insurance papers, and begging clerks to trace missing files behind steel almirahs.
Why? Because a single man dying in an unlit ditch doesn't threaten a cabinet minister's seat. A man dying of methanol along with fifty others on live television makes television anchors shout in English, and English shouting makes politicians reach for the Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund like it’s a ceremonial dish-out tray.
We have turned government relief into a headline lottery.
If a hundred families lose their thatched roofs in a cyclone that gets a name from the Meteorological Department, the cameras arrive, the helicopters fly over, and the ex-gratia flows like monsoon runoff. If a localized squall knocks down three huts in an unnamed village and crushes a grandmother under a coconut tree, the revenue inspector shows up four days later, measures the fallen trunk with a cloth tape, and offers three thousand rupees for roof repairs.
The loss of the human life is identical. The grief is identical. The empty stove in the kitchen is identical.
The only difference is the camera angle.
The government doesn't give ten lakhs to the Kallakurichi families because it suddenly discovered a deep, abiding love for poor working-class men who drink cheap liquor to numb their aching joints after twelve hours of manual labour. If the state cared about those men, it wouldn't let local DMK functionaries and police inspectors run illegal bootlegging dens out of sugarcane fields three kilometres from the taluk office. It gives ten lakhs to buy silence. It gives ten lakhs to turn a massive failure of law enforcement into a photo-op of state benevolence.
It's a dirty grift, and everyone involved knows it.
If the principle of disaster relief is to help a citizen whose life has been shattered by an unforeseen catastrophe, then the number of dead bodies in the newspaper shouldn't dictate the size of the cheque. One death from a collapsed public wall should carry the exact same compensation as fifty deaths from poison liquor.
Better yet: stop handing out ad-hoc political purses altogether.
Build a universal accidental death and disability insurance framework. Set clear, automatic, rule-based disaster norms under SDRF where every house collapse, every road crash caused by government negligence, and every industrial accident gets the exact same formula-based payout, no matter whether the media is watching or not.
Instead, we have politicians playing Robin Hood with taxpayer money whenever their skin is on the line. They hand out ten lakhs for headline tragedies, while the guy who breaks his neck on an unpainted municipal speedbreaker gets to pay his own hospital bill.
It ain't compassion. It's just crisis management with a chequebook.
Image Credit: Beanham Japan Surrender 1945 SLNSW FL21240945.jpg via Wikimedia Commons