If India’s economy is emerging fast, shouldn’t the value we place on lives be going up too?

At first glance, this may seem like a question for economists and statisticians, a matter of compensation data, actuarial logic and policy benchmarks. It is nothing of the sort. It is a moral question that we in India must ask ourselves.As a citizen who has lived his entire life in India’s metropolitan cities, benefited from a measure of material success and travelled globally, my conclusion is neither emotional nor ideological.

Across domains, decades and governments, the actual value of an Indian life, as encoded in our systems, appears alarmingly low. In practice, it often feels close to zero.This is not because we lack compassion. Families care deeply, communities respond instinctively and individuals routinely compensate for systemic gaps.

But compassion at the individual level seems to coexist with indifference at the systemic level and personal care cannot substitute for institutional responsibility forever. It does not take a tragedy to occur for citizens to recognize that their time, safety, health and dignity hold limited institutional value. Hours lost to unsafe roads, polluted air, unreliable public services, extractive healthcare and adversarial bureaucracy are not experienced as policy failures, but as normal conditions of citizenship.Consider what we have normalized.

Fake news circulates freely, eroding trust. Adulterated food and medicines enter supply chains with little apparent deterrence. Medical advice is sometimes shaped less by patient welfare than by revenue incentives.

Educational institutions extract fees with limited accountability for long-term outcomes. Pollution harms our health, but is treated as just another inconvenience. Our cities shorten lives slowly and predictably, and this is