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Published in Open magazine in June 2015

 
The late Jagendra Singh, a journalist from Shahjahanpur district of Uttar Pradesh


Like many others over the past week, these visitors too have reached Khutar village in an SUV with its windows rolled up. The journalists lounging around the tent shake off their hibernation and follow their cameramen towards the parking spot. Three people, well in their fifties, alight from the vehicle and walk towards the heart of the assembly, where members of Jagendra Singh’s family are staging a dharna

A local journalist, apparently a mediator between the visitors and the family, introduces the new arrivals as members of the Press Council of India (PCI). The family had been told to expect them. Abandoning the makeshift dais, they make their way to the twin-storeyed house across the street. Under the glare of media cameras, the PCI team follows them inside. The doors shut behind them. Most journalists retreat to their spot under a peepal tree.

Twenty minutes later, the team heads back to its egg-on-wheels. Questions are flung at them. Answers, at first, are avoided before an official statement is issued to pacify the clamouring journalists. While the father Sumer Singh, elder son Rajvender and daughter Rachana are back at the dharna, the mother Suman and younger ward Rahul are nowhere to be seen. I walk to their house and spot the two leaning against a courtyard wall, pacifying the sons’ aunt, Lovely Singh.

“...what was the point of shouting at them?” Rahul is saying.

“They come here, ask questions about what happened—to you, me, others. They have all seen him after he was set on fire, saying who was responsible. And yet they all want to conduct investigations,” the aunt rants. “Why can’t they just punish the minister right away?”

Seeing his mother shrivel up in a corner, Rahul reiterates the importance of their ‘fight’, one they are putting up “without food or water, under the hot sun”. Lovely refuses to be consoled but keeps mum. Finally, Rahul tells her that she’d better compose herself. Some mausi has come to meet her. “Hogi koi mausi,” Lovely replies, dismissively.

Rahul and I walk back to the living room to pick up the threads from where we left off last. In the next hour, he would tell me about the attack on his father Jagendra Singh, a social media journalist, by goons allegedly working for Ram Murti Singh Verma, UP’s minister for dairy development. The attack of 1 June was allegedly coordinated by the minister’s henchmen with the help of the police. Around 2.30 pm, some six men had forced their way into Singh’s house in Shahjahanpur, pinned him down, poured petrol on his torso and set him on fire. Eight days later, he died in a civil hospital in the state capital. Many believe it was the price he paid for his relentless reportage against the minister.

Rahul repeats this tale at least six times a day to the media. All of 21 years, he is a savvy man who knows what they want. He has names and contact numbers at ready recall; photo-graphs of his father, print-outs of his reportage, documents of police complaints and a list of his father’s friends are kept handy as well. He also participates in prime-time TV debates, proffers sound bites and puts forth the family’s demands: monetary compensation, government jobs for the two siblings and a CBI probe of his father’s death. He is the one who would, on 22 June, accept an invitation to meet Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav along with his father at his office in Lucknow—for what’s widely seen as a compromise. There, he would accept the offer for government jobs for both siblings, compensation of Rs 30 lakh and an arms licence in exchange of ending the dharna and calling off the demand for a CBI probe.

“The Honourable Chief Minister has asked us to trust him and we have agreed,” he’d later tell me over the phone, the reverence in his voice a far cry from the contempt of politicians he’d displayed a week ago. “Rajyapal Ram Naik. Mahamahim (His Excellency) Rajyapal Ram Naik,” he had said once, using emphasis to heap scorn on the title as he recalled a recent conversation he’d had with the Governor of UP.

But for now, as we resume our places on plastic chairs in the living room, Rahul turns to me and smiles: “If his younger sister is like this, imagine what my father was like.”



Rajvendra Singh (L), son of the deceased journalist, along with his grandfather at the protest venue


While UP famously has the country’s largest number of newspapers, social media has emerged a powerful—if not always credible—circulator of information. One such blip on the screen was Jagendra Singh’s news portal on Facebook, Shahjahanpur Samachar. The lanky 46-year-old had had more than a decade of field experience, a part of which was spent with a prominent Hindi daily Amar Ujala, before he launched the portal four years ago. News updates appeared daily on his portal—mostly centred on crime and civic issues. Among his base of nearly 5,000 subscribers were politicians, bureaucrats and journalists of hyper-local and regional dailies.

“Even after all these years, most of our household expenses are borne by my grandfather,” says Rahul. A retired post- master, Sumer Singh’s monthly pension is what feeds the family of five and funds the education of his two grandsons and a granddaughter. “[My father] earned when, at times, newspapers carried his articles. Sometimes, people advertised through him or offered him Rs 100-200 in exchange of publishing a news report.” But his wants were few and he was a man of integrity, the family insists. That the journalists he groomed went on to become richer than him; that the family couldn’t afford to have a TV in their house until Rajvender received one as dowry, these things never bothered him. In 2007, he got a job with a local daily at Shahjahanpur and moved to a single- storied house in Awas Vikas Colony.

If one scrolls down the news-feed of Shahjahanpur Samachar till 18 April, one would notice what is frequently cited by the family and local journalists as the genesis of the tragedy. In a detailed exposé, the minister is alleged to have colluded with a district supply officer to siphon off 275 tonnes of wheat every month. It was one of the first of several reports Singh had written against Verma, an elected MLA of the ruling Samajwadi Party from the same district, till the end of May. These range from illegal mining and land grabbing to sexual harassment.

On the evening of 28 April, as per the FIR filed by Singh at Sadar police station, a motorcycle intercepted his near Awas Vikas Colony, and five men emerged who battered him with sticks, fracturing his leg. One of the accused he named was Gufran, who is known in media circles as a close aide of the minister. On 12 May, local journalist Anil Kumar Bhadoria filed an FIR at Kotwali police station against Singh for assaulting and kidnapping him. It was an intimidation tactic by the minister who had doled out favours to Bhadoria, Singh countered, and rubbished the allegations. Undeterred, Singh continued his anti-minister reportage and rhetoric, and on 28 May, reported an anganwadi worker’s allegations of rape against the minister, Bhadoria, inspector Prakash Rai of Kotwali police station, Gufran and a certain BK Dixit. It was apparently the last straw.

“He had never tried to approach Murti for his side of the story,” says Rohit Yadav, who runs a portal called Shahjahanpur Khabar. Yadav, who claims to have been close to Singh, was whom the latter had rung up for help right after the April assault.

             It was 31 May. Singh had travelled back to his Khutar house for the weekend. “Late in the evening, my father got a call from ‘the nephew’ of Murti. He said that the mantriji (minister) wanted to meet him,” says Rahul. The phone call raised the family’s hackles, and they all warned him against venturing out in the wee hours. The next day, according to Rahul, on his way to the neighbouring district, he joined his father and together they travelled to their house in the city.

Meanwhile, the anganwadi worker had started receiving dire threats if she didn’t withdraw her application. On the instructions of her lawyer Virendra Pal Chauhan, who had taken up her case at Singh’s request, she went to the office of Superintendent of Police Babloo Kumar. Around 2 pm, she submitted a letter detailing the calls on her number, and came out. It is at this point that the narrative gets truly murky, with contrasting accounts of the administration and of the aggrieved.




In the second week of June, a chilling video clip (as posted above) featuring Jagendra Singh went viral on social media. You see him lying shirtless on a stretcher, swaying in agony, his burnt body covered with a white cream. The ends of his fingers look like reeds. “If they had come to arrest me, why did they have to set me on fire?” he weeps.

“Who all were there at the time?” a man is overheard asking.

“There was Shri Prakash Rai, some five or six policemen and Gufran,” says Singh. “If the minister and his goons had a grudge,” Singh adds, “they could have beaten me instead of pouring petrol and burning me.”

Shortly after, the local media approached Prakash Rai, who was in charge of Kotwali police station and had led the team to Singh’s doorstep. (He has been suspended since.) He refuted the charge, stating that the team had gone to arrest the journalist on the basis of Bhadoria’s FIR. Finding his house locked from within, the cops decided to scale the wall. By then, Singh had set himself alight. The policemen, by Rai’s account, doused the fire and took him to the local hospital and he was shifted to a government hospital in Lucknow the same day.

“What about the [anganwadi worker]?” asks a journalist. “She was already inside the house,” Rai replies.

The police later registered an FIR against Singh for an attempt to commit suicide. The worker, whose rape allegation had still not translated into an FIR at the time in spite of three interventions by the judicial magistrate, was made party to the case and charged with abetting the crime.

The Singhs’ version differs. Jagendra breathed his last on 8 June after having given numerous statements to the media. During this period, they drafted an application along with Chauhan detailing the sequence of events and addressed it to the district magistrate, superintendent of police and the state government. It was a request to register an FIR against the perpetrators. It was only on 9 June, once the family refused to cremate him (in protest), that the complaint was registered.

 
Suman Singh, the wife of Jagendra, rendered inconsolable at one of the ceremonies after his death

“I was there when it happened,” says Rajvender, who says he had travelled to the city to fetch medicines for his grandfather a few hours after his father and brother left. Around 2 pm, he decided to visit his father at home when he saw a police jeep, with the anganwadi worker and six policemen, and a Bolero with the minister’s henchmen, including Gufran, outside.

“Some of the men scaled the wall and entered. In a few minutes, we heard my father yelling for help. The men were beating him,” says Rajvender. He, along with the worker and policemen, started hammering the iron door till the bottom half was bent out of shape. They crawled into the house courtyard through a gap. The woman hurried into the house, but he was held back at gunpoint, he says. Through a window, he adds, he saw that his father had been set on fire. “It happened within five to seven minutes. When they came out, the policemen had put out the flames with blankets. Since the lock refused to budge, they crawled out of the space we had made in the door.”

The woman told Rajvender she would attend to Singh and asked him to fetch his family from Khutar.

On a visit two weeks after the incident, I find the Awas Vikas Colony house locked from the outside. Two policemen take turns with two more to keep a vigil round the clock. None of the neighbours speaks to me on record. However, they independently state that while people had turned up in droves to witness the commotion, nobody saw Rajvender anywhere at the crime scene.

Singh’s lawyer Virendra Chauhan confirms my suspicions. “The FIR has been written differently from what had happened. We have planted him there,” he says. Advocate Nutan Thakur, an activist who practises in the Lucknow High Court, says this is a common tendency. “Testimonials given by eyewitnesses at the time of crime are often retracted during investigations and hearings. So advocates tell their clients to show one of their own people present on the spot. A family member is more difficult to break.”

That leaves only one eyewitness to the case: the anganwadi worker who was present according to both versions. The aforementioned video clip was shot in the Shahjahanpur hospital on the day of the immolation. It shows the woman telling Kumar what had happened: “It started after I submitted the application to you. They put me in a car, took me [to Singh’s house] and poured petrol on him. On the way, Gufran grabbed me by my neck and molested me.” 


A policeman on guard outside the residence of Jagendra Singh, a place where the alleged attempt to murder took place


After Singh’s death, the woman reiterated her statements to the media. However, she soon went incommunicado. The police posted their personnel outside her residence which, by Kumar’s claim, was on her own request. By media reports, she was taken to a magistrate on 17 June where she—an accused in the police’s FIR, an eyewitness in the family’s—changed her stance to say that the journalist had immolated himself on learning that the police had come to arrest him.

Despite persistent attempts, Open has been unable to contact Bhadoria, the anganwadi worker or Ram Murti Verma. In the second week of June, an internal circular of the Samajwadi Party forbade its office bearers from talking to the media. The five policemen accused by the family had, in the interim, been suspended. The UP government has handed the case over to the DIG of Police at Bareilly.

A visit to the Superintendent of Police’s office has much to reveal. “We have constituted a team involving the additional SP, a police inspector and officers from the crime branch to investigate both the FIRs,” says Babloo Kumar. He insists that the accused cannot be said to be absconding. None of them has been arrested, though. 

During the investigations, the Shahjahanpur police claimed to have found seven FIRs registered against Singh, charging him with assault, theft and extortion. “I couldn’t find any FIRs registered against the minister, not even the one you told me about,” says the police officer, referring to the one listed in Murti’s affidavit submitted to the Election Commission, admitting a case against him related to ‘assault’ and ‘insult with intent to provoking breach of peace’. I later recheck if the said complaint was registered in his jurisdiction. The place of the FIR reads: ‘Criminal no. 1409A/09, Thana Sadar Bazaar, Shahjahanpur.’ 

A few days later, I call the police officer again. “We haven’t come to a conclusion yet,” he tells me. “But based on the findings till now, it seems like a case of suicide.”

On the day I meet Inspector General of Police (Civil Defence) Amitabh Thakur, he is fresh off staging a dharna outside the Director General of Police office in Lucknow. Around six months ago, shortly after his wife moved an application against the UP Mining Minister Gayatri Prajapati for facilitating illegal mining, a “false complaint” alleging rape was registered against the couple. 

“My situation is so similar to Jaginder’s. It seems like these occurrences are a rule, not an exception,” Thakur says. Among journalists, he has the reputation of being an upright officer who often invites trouble for standing up against corruption. After graduating from IIT-Kharagpur, he joined the Indian Police Service in 1992, and by 2010, had been transferred as many as 22 times.

Thakur has been tracking the case and also visited the family after Singh was admitted to hospital. It was on one of these visits that he recorded Singh as he lay on his bed, his body an ulcerous red. Though Singh found it hard to speak, he was determined to share his story: “They first beat me, then abused me. They said, ‘You dare write against Ram Murti? You are the one who has accused him of rape.’”

“In Uttar Pradesh,” says Thakur, “it’s like this: show me the person, I’ll show you the rule.”
           


Published in the Open magazine in June 2015


Labourers hard at work on an afternoon in coastal Andhra Pradesh


On the evening of 23 May, as she downed the shutters of her tiffin shop in Kothapatnam village in Andhra Pradesh, Padmavati Sanagapalli decided to board a bus to town early the next day. It was 14 days since her brother had passed away and his family was holding a religious ceremony at their house in Ongole, around 20 km away from her village in Prakasam district. The temperature of the coastal town had soared in the past few days and delaying her departure would mean facing the blaze both ways. 

When she returned, she found her 56-year-old husband Sanagapalli Srinivas Rao fast asleep inside the shop. Without a second glance, she started manning the counter. The siesta didn’t hurt business; the crowd had been thin in the afternoons with most people staying indoors. “An hour later, I checked on him again but he still lay there, unmoving. I panicked and called for the doctor,” she says a week later, sitting in a local community hall along with her daughter and a few relatives. It is an austere setting: the duo sit on two mats on a granite floor as their relatives mill about a few feet away from the deceased’s framed photograph propped on a plastic chair.

Word of heat wave casualties has become increasingly shrill among locals. In the absence of a plausible explanation of why a ‘perfectly healthy man’ would suddenly die, the family decides to believe that the calamity has struck their household as well. Informed of it, the local tehsildar has sent his daily count of heat-wave deaths to the district collector: two in a population of 50,000.

The heat wave, which started off as a ‘news brief’ shoved to the margins of newspapers, now has top billing in the Indian and international media. Headlines flash that the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana are bitten by a heat wave. The all-India death toll has reportedly crossed 2,000, making it the fifth most lethal heat wave in the world.

On 26 May, as the number of reported deaths continued to mount, the Andhra Pradesh government declared ex-gratia compensation under the Chief Minister Relief Fund (CMRF) amounting to Rs 1 lakh for each victim. To weed out false claims, each of these deaths was to be investigated by a three-member committee consisting of a medical officer, tehsildar and police officer. “In order to accelerate the process and keeping in mind the sentiments of the people, the government ruled out post-mortems,” says Sujatha Sharma, the collector of Prakasam.

When Dr D Rosaiah, in charge of the local primary health unit, visited the late Sanagapalli Srinivas’ family, they told him exactly what they had said to me. “But we made a few additional inquiries with the neighbours and found out that the deceased was suffering from tuberculosis,” says the doctor, “The nurses at my centre confirmed that he used to visit the [primary health unit] to procure medicines. But over the last few months, he had stopped taking them.” It wasn’t the heat wave that killed Sanagapalli, Dr Rosaiah had concluded, but multi- drug resistant tuberculosis.

Among the 13 cases that the doctor later examined from the village, he found that only four deaths were caused by the heat wave. The rest died of heart diseases, HIV, and, in a few cases, natural causes. “Since there is no post-mortem conducted on the victims and the findings are based only on inquiries, one can never be hundred per cent certain about the cause of death,” he says, “But what I have generally observed is that people are aware of the compensation they are entitled to. Often, they end up reporting a natural death as one caused by the heat wave.”

I ask a senior IAS officer about this alleged tendency of people to capitalise on the compensation being offered. While I get a confirmation on the trend in general, the officer refuses to make such a comment on-record, fearing he would be labelled as an ‘insensitive’ administrator. Till last week, by the time the mercury had slowly started to recede in the state; Kothapatnam had reported 14 cases of heat-wave related fatalities. After investigations, the number of families eligible for compensation stood at just five.


Padmavati Sanagapalli was reported to have lost her husband to the extreme temperatures. An official probe revealed that it was actually a drug resistant tuberculosis.



A heat wave, as defined by India’s National Disaster Management Authority, is a condition declared when the maximum temperature at a weather station crosses 40° Celsius for plains and 30° for hill stations. Worst affected by a heat wave are usually the poor. Symptoms of heat-induced illness range from fatigue and nausea to headaches and dizziness. But it only becomes fatal when those in a ‘red zone’ (as marked on an isotherm map) are hit by a sunstroke, mainly caused by prolonged exposure to the sun and inadequate intake of fluids.

For someone tracking the numbers, however, the emerging data is difficult to grapple with. The number of dead varies depending on which news source one refers to. For example, on 28 May, the Telugu daily Eenadu reported that nearly 2,600 people had lost their lives in the past one week in the two states. On the same day, the news channel NDTV pegged the figure at 1,700, whereas The Times of India claimed that 900 had died in the region. By broad consensus, the cities of Prakasam, Guntur and Visakhapatnam are said to be the worst hit. These three coastal cities have reported an aggregate toll of 751 deaths, and the entire state, a total of 1,709.

One of the main agencies supplying figures to the media is the disaster management unit of the respective states. However, given the conflicting numbers, journalists and authorities say that it is probably a result of ‘an initiative taken by the regional media’. A correspondent of Eenadu in Telangana admits as much. “Unlike the mainstream media, regional dailies have a presence at the grassroots and report deaths as they emerge. We get our data from the mandal level (an administrative block which several villages under it). Many of those in the mainstream media also take this data from us and report it,” he says. There is, however, one flaw in this grassroots reportage: instead of delving into the cause of deaths, all fatalities are clumped as ‘heat wave related’.

In the last week of May, in order to generate awareness of the deaths, the authorities started holding special programmes. Srinivas Rao, the revenue divisional officer (RDO) of Prakasam, recounts an incident when he was holding a gram sabha in Inkollu mandal. “Around 6 am, an hour before the programme was to begin, a villager who was drawing water from a tub collapsed and died on the spot,” says Rao, “When I reached the venue, [the villager’s] relatives approached me and asked me to register it as a sunstroke death.” The doctors eventually ruled cardiac arrest as the cause of death. “But that is what generally happens... people are reporting the heat wave as a cause of death just to receive ex gratia [compensation].”

A man taking a bath in the open on a May afternoon in Ongole


On the day of my visit to Rao at his office, the district’s official death toll is 202. Rao explains that each death in the region is reported by the tehsildar to an RDO who, in turn, forwards it to the district collector. The information is then passed on to the state disaster management cell, which forms the primary source of information for the media. “But the figures we submit to the cell are of deaths suspected to have been caused by sunstrokes,” he says. “They are not confirmed ‘heat wave deaths’ as they are reported. The number includes the sum of all deaths that have occurred during this period likely to be caused by sunstroke. For example, it will not include a road or traffic accident, but if the deceased was within four walls when it happened, it then qualifies as a ‘suspected death’.”

In the absence of an autopsy, the committee members conduct inquiries about the medical history and work routine of the deceased, and examine the circumstantial evidence. The medical officer conducts a preliminary check of the body—if it has not already been cremated or buried—and the police file a panchnama for the case to rule out other possibilities. Based on the findings, a certificate is issued to the kin of the deceased stating whether or not the death was caused by sunstroke. These victims can then apply for compensation under the CMRF.

“So far, in our district, nearly 200 deaths are reported in all the 56 mandals,” says Rao. “After getting an inquiry from the team of officers in their respective jurisdictions, we found that only 30 cases come under the category [of sunstroke]. Most were suffering from diseases like cancer and AIDS in addition to those who died of natural causes. Some of them were [in their nineties] who had been bedridden for the last few months.”

By 31 May, the reported death toll for the district had swelled to 337, but the number confirmed was only 56. Officials explain that the number is indicative only of those considered eligible for compensation. The person has to be between 18 and 69 years of age, which qualifies only 185 people. This is a practice that is still followed even though there is no such eligibility criteria set by the government. In the neighbouring Guntur district where 233 cases were reported, only 35 deaths have been confirmed out of 130 cases taken up for investigation. The results of more inquiries are expected soon. 

“The information that initially reaches us passes through three to four levels, so there is always a possibility of the numbers not holding up. Compared to the initial numbers, we are expecting 20 to 25 per cent reduction in the actual number of casualties,” says Dhananjay Reddy, director of the Andhra Pradesh Disaster Management Department. He adds that the department had received reports that only 500 deaths in the state could be confirmed as caused by the heat wave.

For the dissonance between the reported numbers and the actual figures, Rao points at the logistical constraints that prevent them from submitting accurate data at the very onset, instead of ‘suspected sunstroke deaths’. “One tehsildar covers 10 to 15 villages, sometimes up to 20 villages. Say, four or five deaths are reported in one day. How can one be expected to conduct an inquiry the same day?” In spite of that, he adds, the rules mandate that the fatality has to be reported to the government within 24 hours. The information is thus supplied in two stages and the ‘suspected sunstroke deaths’ end up masquerading as ‘heat wave fatalities’.


Elore Thimmaiah, a patient admitted at RIMS hospital in May, along with his son


In spite of the confusion, all quarters agree on one integral aspect: temperatures have reached alarming heights. According to data available at the India Meteorological Department, over the past 10 years, the maximum temperature in Ongole, the administrative area of Prakasam, has hovered around 45° Celsius for the month of May. While parts of the state touched 47° Celsius, this year was no different for Prakasam. But compare it to the mean-maximum temperature between the years 1971 to 2000 for the month of May in the same district, and one realises the marked rise: from 39.1° to 47° Celsius.

The number of casualties has also increased over the last few years. According to data accessed from the National Crime Records Bureau, in an undivided Andhra Pradesh, the graph has showed a steady rise from 2011 to 2013 with 91, 221 and 418 deaths in the state in those three years respectively. After the formation of Telangana as a separate state, the death toll for Andhra Pradesh fell to 371 in 2014 before it shot up dramatically again this year. “For Andhra Pradesh and the rest of the country, heat waves are not an unusual occurrence. So there is no direct one-to- one relation with global warming that we can establish,” says YK Reddy, director in-charge, Indian Meteorological Department in Hyderabad. “In coastal Andhra Pradesh, where the death toll is supposed to be the highest, the temperatures didn’t break any records. But this year, the heat wave lasted for 10 days as opposed to its usual four to five days.”

It need not be that only those with direct exposure to the sun are the ones falling ill. Among the 30 patients that were treated at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ongole, several patients were admitted simply because they couldn’t bear the heat in their own houses. Elore Thimmaiah, a soda- seller, who had been admitted for four days, says that even though he avoided going out before 4 pm, the heat in his tin-roofed dwelling was too oppressive.

In order to deal with the critical temperatures, the government has pressed its machinery to generate awareness about the dangers of the heat wave and made arrangements for water-distribution centres. In Prakasam, packets of oral rehydration salts are being distributed at local train and bus stations. The district administration has also collaborated with a local milk dairy to print about 120,000 pamphlets with Do’s and Don’ts to be followed in the summer months.

TVS Anil Kumar, who has been running a free buttermilk kiosk at TB Road in Ongole for the last two months, tells me what he has gathered from his interactions with visiting labourers. “In the absence of development, people have no choice but to take up jobs as manual labour even in these hot months,” he says. “Sometimes I feel that instead of distributing free TVs during the election season, politicians should distribute free ACs.”

So far, the counter-measures have worked for only those who can afford to be salvaged. Those who are dependent on their daily-work to earn a livelihood, continue to do so, and, as a result, fall prey to the extreme weather. Before the government announced a clampdown on the timings of work assignments under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), around 20 to 25 per cent of those killed by the heat were workers employed under the scheme.

Around 10 am on 22 May, when Subbaratnam, a resident of Kunkupadu village, was out shopping for vegetables, she received a call informing her that her husband Chandra Subbaiah had collapsed while at work. “Under the NREGA, my husband was part of a group that was contracted to dig an artificial pond ahead of the rains. Since our house is under construction and our daughter is unmarried, he went to work every single day,” she says. While Subbaratnam is certified as eligible for compensation, what her husband actually lost his life to was a pitiful fixed salary of Rs 120-150 per shift.

It’s the same story for many others. “Usually, we discharge patients after four to five days of treatment. But many patients leave within one to two days. They couldn’t afford to not work any longer,” says a nurse at the RIMS hospital.

Multiple water and buttermilk distribution centres were set up by the government and citizens across Andhra Pradesh and Telengana to help people deal with the heat


Coupled with poverty, the other major impediment in dealing with a heat wave crisis is the sheer scale of the calamity. In case of any natural disaster like floods, earthquakes or cold-waves, the Centre doles out monetary relief to those affected. It was only in the last week of May, following an uproar over its exclusion, that heat waves were included in the Government’s list of ‘natural disasters’. But the authorities add that apart from spreading awareness and compensation, there is little else to be done in the face of nature’s fury. 

“You are seeing an ecological imbalance. Yes, the green cover is drastically reducing and the ozone layer is also being affected, but this does not mean that you can stop people from earning a livelihood,” says Reddy. “You can’t just create a situation akin to the Emergency.”