[Reader-list] Data on deaths

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All,

I was thinking about the notion of Hypnos and thanatos for some time.
Hypnos and thanatos are ofcourse the personification of sleep and death. I
was wondering why is it that members of our media, our bureaucracy, our
political class and our intelligentsia choose to 'sleep' over some causes of
death and not on others? I started looking at some of the publicly available
data on causes of death in India. Some very interesting statistics came up.

Please have a look.

The data below pertains to ( one year period) i.e. 2007. This data is
published by the National Crime Records Bureau in 2008. It can be accessed
at:
http://ncrb.nic.in/ADSI2008/snapshots.pdf

Cause of Death:

1. Suicide

14 Suicides took place every hour.
♦ More than one lakh persons (1,25,017) in the country lost their lives by
committing
suicide during the year 2008.
♦ It is observed that social and economic causes have led most of the males
to commit
suicides whereas emotional and personal causes have mainly driven females to
end
their lives.

Bengaluru (2,396), Chennai (1,309), Mumbai (1,111) and Delhi (1,107) – the
four cities
together have reported 45.3% of the total suicides reported from 35 mega
cities.

2. Accidental Deaths

Total 3,42,309 accidental deaths in the country during the year 2008.
♦ A total of 6,32,102 cases of ‘Un-Natural Accidents’ caused 3,18,316 deaths
and rendered
4,98,124 people injured during 2008.

3. 'Terrorism'

The data pertains to 1994-2010 (sixteen year period) and can be accessed at:

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/database/indiafatalities.htm

58178

Warm regards

Taha