Indian women twice as likely to burn to death, Lancet study finds
Twelve Indian women burn to death every hour on average – almost double the corresponding number for men – according to a new study published in The Lancet medical journal.
More than half of those are aged between 15 and 34, and many of their deaths are caused by kitchen accidents, self-immolation, or domestic violence, especially over dowry disputes, the study showed.
The results constitute the latest evidence of the vulnerability of women in India, where equality of the sexes is guaranteed in the constitution but remains a distant dream on the ground for all but the very rich.
Despite a raft of laws to protect women’s rights, activists say that India still suffers among the world’s highest rates of female foeticide and infanticide, child marriage, sexual harassment and domestic violence.
The Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, said that only 1 per cent of private property in India was registered in women’s names, and Indian women, on average, get married by 15 and have their first baby at 17.
The new study claims to be the first to calculate the number of Indian women burnt to death every year as the Government does not compile such statistics and police figures are incomplete and notoriously unreliable.
It was conducted by three US-based researchers – Prachi Sanghavi of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kavi Bhalla of Harvard University, and Veena Das of Johns Hopkins University.
They reached their conclusions by examining death registration records from urban hospitals and a survey of autopsies covering rural populations, and by cross-referencing that data with national mortality estimates.
They estimated that there was a total of about 163,000 fire-related deaths in India in 2001, accounting for 2 per cent of all deaths across the entire country of 1.1 billion people.
Their estimate was six times higher than that reported by Indian police, they said.
Of the total number of fire-related deaths, 106,000 were women, and of those 57 per cent were between the ages of 15 and 34, the study showed.
The average ratio between women and men dying by fire was almost 2:1, while that between young women and young men was 3:1, it showed.
