Media, Intia, Maailma: The Media & Disaster

Maailman Sivu (Guardian elokuu 1999 - P.Sainath) The collision between two trains at Ghaisal in the Indian state of West Bengal killing perhaps 300 people has got a lot of media attention. And rightly so. But are the motives driving the media purely humane? Is there is a mandatory number of people who have to die before an issue gets covered? And what of the unseen disasters that kill or devastate millions without making great pictures but which raise uncomfortable questions for the powerful when followed up?

You can look at the devastating collision as the result of 'criminal negligence' within the Indian rail system, as railway minister Nitish Kumar puts it. But there's another way you can look at the train tragedy: as a disaster waiting to happen. One driven by policies right from the top.

Since 1992, successive ministers, Nitish Kumar amongst them, have added on over 900 trains to an already overburdened rail system. That's perhaps without parallel in the world. Each incoming minister launches new routes that serve his own constituency. But this is an era where the public sector has suffered calculated neglect. Staffing levels have not kept pace at all. A system that has added far less hands than it needs ends up with signalmen handling far more trains than they should. Even as the wagons get older, train speeds are increasing.

Maintenance budgets across such public sector bodies have mostly stagnated or declined. Where new technologies have come in, retraining of staff has been poor. Yet, each year, we add over 120 new trains on average. The number of accidents has also been going up.

Nitish Kumar has resigned owing 'moral responsibility'. Few things are more calculated to set off eruptions of 'moral responsibility' than having polls just 30 days away. The same minister's moral responses lay undisturbed when 220 people died in another rail accident eight months ago. But there were no elections to worry about then.

The inevitable enquiry committees are in place. As for the verdict, you can be sure of one thing: it won't say much on the political grandstanding that endangers safety. Nor will it say a word on an overall framework that condemns the public sector to a worsening performance.

And soon, after much righteous indignation, the subject must yield space to others in the media.

The death of so many people in the crash is a human tragedy of incredible proportions. But it is also, for the media, an event spectacular. The huge rail carriages piled up in a twisted heap of torn and mangled metal. The shock that produces. The agony and anxiety of survivors and the relatives of the dead. Of course it has to be covered and covered well. You'd like to think though, that the space it gets has everything to do with the sanctity of human life.

You might have to think again. The sheer scale and size and of the accident -- so many dead at one shot -- ensured it got covered that way. The deaths or devastation of many millions routinely due to avoidable causes, remain largely invisible. That's because we have a media veering ever more towards elitism.

Between 1997 and the middle of last year as many as 400 cotton farmers committed suicide in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The economic liberalisation since 1991 had shredded what little remained of state-supported rural credit. The new policies had also jacked up input prices. All those farmers were deep in debt. That, to private moneylenders charging interest often in excess of 100 per cent. Then came crop failure. Many of the farmers killed themselves by swallowing their overpriced and sometimes spurious pesticides. True, those concoctions had had little effect in eradicating pests. But they did a swift job of exterminating the farmers.

The story did not make the cover of a single major English language news magazine in India at the time. Nor did it hit the front pages of most 'national' dailies for a long period. When it did, it sank quite soon, though similar suicides were being reported in other states including the rich ones of Punjab and Maharashtra. Between then and now, however, you can count several magazine covers on the new cars being introduced on India's roads. So how do you get covered if you're not rich? Maybe you have to die in large numbers in one spot at one time.

For the media in the West, too, the train type disaster is a comfortable one to cover. It fits into the old coup-chaos-catastrophe framework that works so well in packaging the third world. It lacks complexity, at least on surface.

It could get more space than the recent Indo-Pak military clashes. In one count, the nearly three month crisis between the two countries over Pakistan's intrusion into Kargil produced exactly one story on the front page of the Washington Post. Yet, there was a real danger of its escalating into a nuclear conflict. One that would have cost a lot more in human lives than a train collision. There was a point at which a newspaper that is a mouthpiece of the ruling BJP, actually called for a nuclear strike on Pakistan. Sure enough, there were similar cries across the border. You'd think it merited more space.

But floods in Bangladesh and train disasters here fit more easily, don't they? Yet, maybe it isn't just big numbers at one time in one place. There has also to be an element of panic, horror, of the spectacular. Our own media are second to none when it comes to this.

Remember the 'plague' of 1994 in India and the hysteria it caused? That made front page almost everywhere in the world quite effortlessly. Actually, the 'plague' took fifty four lives.

Tuberculosis claims over 450,000 Indian lives each year. That's nearly eight thousand times as many as the 1994 'plague' did. But TB would be lucky to get a couple of columns in our newspapers yearly. If it does, it's when the country's distinguished chest physicians, some of whom count newspaper owners among their clients, hold their annual Congress.

Right through the '80s and into the first years of this decade diarrhoea claimed close to 1.5 million infants each year in this country. That's one every three minutes. Or thirty thousand times -- each year -- the number of lives lost in the plague. It gets a pathetic amount of space in the media.

Every fourteen days, over 7.5 million children below the age of five in India suffer from diarrhoea. Close to nineteen million contract acute respiratory infections, including pneumonia, in the same 336 hours. Quite a lot can be done by way of coverage, but isn't. Plague makes for better copy, anyway.

Of course, coverage doesn't necessarily depend on the number of deaths. Who dies is no less important. And that's another reason why the 'plague' got so much space. It threatened the Beautiful People, not just the ones 'out there' in the rural areas or in urban slums. Plague germs are notorious for their non-observance of class distinctions

But getting back to the media and disaster, a group of three can get as many, indeed far more column inches than the train crash if there's a celebrity among them. And you don't have to turn to India for that, thank you. Lady Diana in the UK or JFK Jr. in the US will do quite nicely.

In this country, class divisions in the coverage of death usually extend to compensation packages as well. If you're an Indian killed while riding your bicycle, the compensation might not do much more than replace the bike for your family. Bus accidents don't rate much either. If, on the other hand, you die in an air disaster, the payouts would be many times larger. In the Bengal rail accident, though, there could be higher levels of compensation thanks to the kind of media space it is getting. But while that's a good thing, there's another danger. Big compensation packages could be announced while the media heat is on. They may not materialise later. The media might have lost interest by then.

Covering the disasters we do the way we do may not be altogether wrong. But it looks bad when set next to those we don't cover. Or alongside those we distort. Year after year, the Human Development Report of the UNDP points to sharply widening disparities across the globe, between nations, within them. These are disparities that are policy driven in this, our age of Market Fundamentalism. The richest fifth of the world's population now has an income 74 times that of the poorest fifth. In 1960, they earned 30 times as much as the poorest fifth. The three richest people in the world are wealthier than the poorest 36 nations combined.

Growing impoverishment for hundreds of millions signals not one but many giant tragedies. So there's no shortage of disasters in a world where already obscene disparities are getting worse. But when those making big bucks from such misery increasingly own the media everywhere, these are not about to be well covered or discussed.

A pity. It could save a lot more than 300 human lives.

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