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

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 described as the cost of growth.

In a sense, citizenship itself has been hollowed out. The economically weak matter politically as vote banks, while the wealthy matter as sources of funding and influence. Everyone else is managed administratively. In general, the quality of life remains secondary, acknowledged in speeches but rarely embedded in policy design.

Corruption persists not as an exception, but as a tolerated bug. Living costs rise faster than incomes. Middle-agers wonder how they will afford healthcare as they age.

Younger citizens confront a different anxiety: whether stable jobs will exist at all and whether they will suffice to support lives of dignity. Entry-level salaries paid by large tech firms have stagnated for nearly two decades, even as these firms have benefited from public land, incentives and infrastructure provided in the name of national development.

Road fatalities are routine, yet safety rarely commands attention. Cities claim to be citizen friendly while staying structurally hostile to pedestrians, the elderly, children and persons with disabilities.

All this points to a deep contradiction. Even as India seeks greater global relevance as a leading economy and credible voice, domestic policy choices reveal a non-existent commitment to everyday life. Strategic ambition cannot go with civic neglect. Until every Indian life is treated as equal, as envisioned by the Constitution, claims of development will remain constitutionally hollow.

In practice, the value accorded to an Indian life still seems to vary sharply by class, caste, gender, geography and economic status. A construction worker’s death is treated as an unfortunate incident and a pedestrian’s as a traffic disruption. Likewise, a hospital death is a capacity issue. Such outcomes are rarely framed as governance failures. They are treated as externalities.

What is most revealing is not that such fatalities occur. No society is free of risk. It is how little they change behaviour.

Threats to India’s financial stability provoke swift action; markets are stabilized and assets protected. Mortal risks, by comparison, evoke sympathy but rarely reform. Capital seems to matter most. Over time, this reshapes our civic culture. Risks and inconveniences become too routine to stir outrage and citizens internalize the assumption that the system cannot be relied upon to come to their aid.

If governance is ultimately about stewardship of everyone’s life and dignity, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that despite political and constitutional promises, the institutional value placed on Indian lives remains too low for a country that aspires to ‘developed’ status.

India’s persistent undervaluation of lives imposes an economic cost. When citizens are compelled to deal with avoidable risks, health hazards, unreliable services and institutional apathy, productivity weakens and trust erodes in ways that constrain the economy’s long-term prospects.

It is worth asking whether these costs have been meaningfully factored into the vision of a Viksit Bharat by 2047. A society’s well-being is measured by how rigorously it designs systems that make life safer and easier to live. Until we have real accountability on this measure, Indian lives will continue to feel undervalued. For India to progress in a way that we can all welcome, citizens must come to matter long before that deadline.

The author is a corporate advisor and author of ‘Family and Dhanda’. X : @ssmumbai.