Interesting Stuff: The Association of Dead People

I’ve only learned about this a few days ago via a talk by Marc Abrahams of the Ig Nobel awards. One of the Ig Nobel peace prizes was awarded to Lal Bihari for founding the Association of Dead People. Apparently the phenomenon of living people being declared legally dead is common in certain parts of India but not well known at all outside those regions or outside the country.

India is probably has the largest, most cumbersome and least efficient bureaucracy in the world. This popular bit of folk wisdom seems to have been confirmed at least in one report in 2010 that dealt with bureaucracies in Asia that placed India last and gave it a score of 9.41 out of a possible 10, 10 being the worst. Corruption in India is also endemic. In 2010 it scored 3.3 on the Corruption Perceptions Index with 1 being the worst. I would imagine a few decades ago it would have been much worse comparatively. Finally in many regions there is a shortage of agricultural land. With landless agricultural day labourers being one of the poorest groups of people in the world, competition for agricultural land is fierce indeed.

So what happens when you combine bureaucracy, corruption and a shortage of land? You get people falsely declared dead. If you stand to inherit some land from a relative you could take out a contract on their life. Certainly some people do this but most people would find it too risky even if they were corrupt (and most probably don’t want to kill their relatives even if they’re prepared to steal their land). What’s much easier and safer is to bribe a government official to do the paperwork declaring your relative’s death. You then get the inheritance. A side effect is that life for the dead person becomes extremely difficult. They are treated as a non-person in the eyes of the law and fall through the cracks of the system almost entirely.

When Bihari was declared dead in 1976 it took him 18 years (ie. till 1994) to have the problem remedied. He dug around and found the problem was common, so he thought the best thing was for the dead people to band together in gatherings, protests and the like. Today the Association has around 20,000 people. Unfortunately, while the Association has increased awareness of the problem, there have not been large scale corrections. Only FOUR members have been declared alive by 2004. A Time article about Bihari explains how difficult it is to get your life back.

Bhagwan Prasad Mishra, 75, is not afraid to fight. A pillar of the Azamgarh community, he has been officially dead since 1977, when four young nephews who managed a family property transferred a half-hectare of his land to their name. Armed with a rifle, Mishra visited the boys and got them to sign an affidavit admitting they committed fraud and had no claim to the land. The affidavit was filed with the Land Court and forgotten. Subsequent petitions to have Mishra declared undead have been similarly mired in legal procedures.

As usual, the most sickening part of the scheme is that the targets are usually the most powerless. Most victims are not pillars of any community but are widows, people with chronic illness and the elderly. And given how hard it’s been for Mishra, you can imagine how much worse it would be for an unknown with no family or community status.

More details on Bihari’s Ig Nobel award here.