Bribing the bereaved | When compensation replaces accountability

The fact that no individual is ever held accountable for a tragedy only reveals the extent to which we have perfected the art of diffused irresponsibility.

The wheels of governance grind slowly — except when it comes to forgetting. In the past few weeks, we have witnessed deeply unsettling tragedies: a young schoolboy in Kerala was electrocuted by a low-hanging electric-wire over a government school, while a five-year-old died after falling into a pit dug by rural water supply authorities in Andhra Pradesh. Rabid dogs attacking children and the victims not surviving despite vaccinations, deaths on roads caused by poor road maintenance — instances of system-induced tragedies are disturbingly frequent. These are not mere ‘incidents’ as official lexicon so evasively suggests; they are State-induced fatalities, slow-motion manslaughters executed through layers of neglect, oversight, and bureaucratic inertia.

Usually, the response is swift — not in securing justice, but in securing silence. A few lines of condolence, smart management of media narratives, the promise of an inquiry, subtle victim-blaming, and the ceremonial handing over of ₹5-10 lakh compensation follows. The villain is upfront identified as the ‘system’ — an amorphous, invisible, abstract entity. Thereafter, a blanket of institutional amnesia descends, uninterrupted by resignations, unperturbed by prosecutions. Nobody is held accountable, and nothing in the system changes. Sadly, similar incidents repeat.

We are no longer delivering justice. We are simply managing outrage. We are doing it with what must now be recognised as a disturbingly ritualised instrument: the self-funded bribe.

When citizens pay for State failures

A public institution — whether school, hospital, road, or municipality — fails to maintain the minimum standards of safety. A citizen dies or suffers consequently. The State expresses regret and offers compensation, not from the budget of the culpable department, nor from the personal liability of the erring officials, but from the consolidated exchequer of the very public it has failed. The taxpayer finances their own indemnification. The victim is paid from the pockets of their peers.

This is not compensation — it is hush money. It is almost always a cheap bribe, because the victims are almost always poor and vulnerable.

The calculus is stark: ₹5 lakh is the price of a child’s life, if that child is the son of a fisherman or a wage worker. If that child had belonged to a bureaucrat, a politician, or a CEO, ₹5 lakh would not have been offered — it would have been laughed at. The value of grief, it turns out, is directly indexed to class.

Who rules, and who dies

This asymmetry of exposure is no accident. It is the result of a silent but seismic exodus of the elite from the very public systems they continue to administer.

Ministers, MLAs, MPs, and IAS/IPS/IRS officers, rarely, if ever, avail the services they oversee. Their children do not attend government schools. Their relatives are not treated in government hospitals. They do not navigate the craters of our panchayat roads, nor wait at the mercy of erratic municipal services. They have seceded — into gated enclaves, private institutions, and parallel ecosystems, while continuing to sign the files, manage the budgets, and frame the policies that govern the rest.

Is it any surprise then that when things fall apart — when a roof caves in, a wire snaps, or a wall collapses — it is never the child of the privileged who dies! It is always the tribal girl, a migrant worker, or the poverty-stricken grandmother in a general ward. This is not coincidence, but class filtration by design. And when tragedy strikes, responsibility is dissipated in the nebulous vapour of that convenient abstraction: ‘the system’.

But the system is not a phantom. It is a collection of names, chairs, and decision files. Higher the position, more is the responsibility. The fact that no individual is ever held accountable only reveals the extent to which we have perfected the art of diffused irresponsibility.

We need safety

This is a plea for the minimum moral compact of a civilised State: that public services must be safe, especially for those who cannot afford private alternatives.

It is unacceptable that stray dogs maul ordinary citizens while senior officers sleep behind iron gates, that potholes swallow two-wheeler riders while ministers glide smoothly with police escort, and that children get killed in government schools while the privileged send their kids to private international schools. Right to life with dignity is a fundamental right after all!

Beyond compensation

To correct this foundational inequality, India must institute a Public Accountability and Liability Act — a statute that does for government negligence what tort law has long done for corporate misconduct. At its heart would lie a mandatory internal insurance architecture, requiring each department to contribute to a pooled public risk and accountability fund, activated in cases of verified public system failure.

Whether compensation is routed through departmental reserves or the exchequer, the money remains public. The problem is that accountability has been fully diffused, and responsibility has been institutionally anonymised.

The proposed law must compel the system to name names, trace file movements, document ignored warnings, and prosecute patterns of dereliction. Compensation must never be the end of the matter — it must be the beginning of culpability. Where gross negligence or wilful misconduct is evident, a portion of the cost must be recovered personally from the salaries, pensions, or benefits of the responsible officials. Only when the State begins to penalise failure at the level of individual liability will there be real deterrence.

Departments with recurrent failures must face steeper premium contributions and mandatory public risk ratings, akin to how insurers rate high-risk clients. Governance must learn to feel the consequences of harm caused to the people it serves.

Others do it

The United Kingdom holds institutions criminally liable under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, 2007. It makes corporations, certain listed departments, bodies, partnerships, etc. accountable for deaths caused by systemic failure. The United States permits lawsuits against government departments under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

India has seen the judiciary intervene in landmark cases like the Uphaar Cinema fire and Consumer Education & Research Centre v. Union of India, where the State was found culpable for systemic lapses.

Even the World Bank’s 2017 World Development Report identifies ‘functional accountability of institutions’ as central to governance reform. The OECD’s 2020 Public Governance Review goes further, advocating risk-based models for liability in public service frameworks. States across India badly needs an accountability act that could fix responsibility and liability on this strange creature called ‘system’ that has been on a killing-spree among citizens.

The minimum contract

What distinguishes democracies from despotic regimes is not the quality of their elites but the safety of their citizens. When the poor die in silence and the privileged live in insulation, democracy becomes a farce masquerading as a republic.

We must stop bribing citizens with their tax money to accept death by negligence. The State must insure its failures — and pay a penalty in terms of money, power, and position, when those failures cost lives. Until then, we are just a tax-funded hazard delivery service with a polite apology script.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

(Prasanth Nair is a civil servant and author.)