25/05/2026
Complexity of Poverty in India – Dignity denial at death to Bhagyalakshmi
Somewhere in the expanding outskirts of Chennai, where the airport lights blink all night over old villages that no longer remember themselves, a sack lay by the roadside. People walked past it first as people do in cities trained to avert their eyes from the shapes of suffering. Then someone noticed a hand. An old woman’s hand tied inside the mouth of the sack like contraband.
Her name was Bhagyalakshmi. Seventy-five years old. Flower seller. Mother of ten children. Dead.
The newspapers reported it with the efficiency reserved for the poor. A few paragraphs. A chronology of failure. A body found near Tirisulam. A man named Mohammed Hassan. No money for funeral expenses. The body abandoned because death itself had become unaffordable.
And that phrase — *no money for funeral expenses* — travels through India like a quiet epidemic. It appears in police records, hospital corridors, railway stations, flood camps, crematorium queues. It is the final receipt issued by poverty. The point at which even grief must submit to accounting.
Bhagyalakshmi did not become poor on the day she died. Poverty is never an event. It is a long administrative process. A gradual erasure conducted over decades by family, state, market, caste, religion, labour, illness, inflation, and exhaustion. By history itself. ...
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