Not a party scorecard. A citizen record of what millions still live with: dirty water, unsafe food, farmer distress, court queues, job fear, broken roads, filthy streets, heat and floods, TB and dengue, and taxes that feel heavy while footpaths vanish. Every number below links to government data, courts, or major public studies.
This page is about public failure and human cost, not BJP vs Congress talking points. Fix the system, whoever sits in the chair.
10,546Farm suicides 2024
5.08 crCourt cases pending
1.75LRoad deaths 2024
3.2LTB deaths 2023
29,536Rape cases (NCRB 2024)
9,438Pothole deaths 2020-24
1,70,746Total suicides 2024
17L+Air pollution deaths 2022
Water you cannot trust without a purifier
24% of Jal Jeevan tap samples failed microbiological tests (2024)
India runs the world's largest rural tap-water mission. On paper, lakhs of villages got connections. In practice, many households still boil water, buy cans, or run RO filters because what comes from the tap fails basic safety tests or arrives dirty.
Scroll and IndiaSpend reported that roughly three in four rural households still drink untreated water in many survey years. Urban slums and old pipes tell the same story: you pay municipal tax, then pay again for purification.
Water is not a luxury add-on. It is the first need. When the state cannot deliver clean water at the tap, it quietly pushes the bill onto families who already struggle with rent and school fees.
Fluoride, arsenic, and bacterial contamination persist in many districts (official water-quality reports and NGO mapping).
Tanker mafias thrive where pipelines leak or run dry in summer.
Women and girls still carry the time cost of fetching and storing water.
Street milk cut with water and chemicals. Spices dyed with industrial colour. Sweet oil replaced with cheaper fat. This is not a WhatsApp rumour wall. FSSAI's own annual testing record shows tens of thousands of samples not conforming to standards.
Middle-class India buys branded packs and still reads recall news. Poorer India buys loose goods with fewer labels and less lab backup. The health cost lands in clinics, not in election speeches.
Raids make headlines for a week. Permanent enforcement, street labs, and visible punishment for repeat offenders stay thin in most cities.
Milk, edible oil, spices, and mithai categories show up often in enforcement reports.
Food poisoning outbreaks in schools and functions still make local news every season.
Consumers are told to stay alert while the inspection network stays understaffed.
Official crime data is always an undercount: many survivors never file, police turn them away, or cases get recorded under milder sections. Even so, NCRB numbers keep climbing year after year.
Fast-track courts exist on paper. Delays, victim blaming, and political protection for powerful accused still break trust. A country that markets itself as a young superpower still fails the most basic safety test for half its people.
Street lighting, safe public transport, working helplines, and police that believe survivors are infrastructure. They are not optional culture-war topics.
NCRB 2023 reported 31,516 rape cases; 2024 shows 29,536 (methodology and reporting vary by state).
Child sexual abuse and domestic violence add parallel crises not fully visible in one headline number.
Justice delayed is safety denied. Backlog feeds fear.
Tax like a developed country, amenities like a broken town
Indians pay income tax, GST on almost everything, fuel cess, road cess, property tax, professional tax, and endless fees at every office. Total tax-to-GDP is lower than OECD averages, but the middle class feels a developed-country tax bite on a developing-country public service.
Public health spending stays near 1-2% of GDP for years. OECD peers spend far more. Out-of-pocket medical bills still push families into debt. You pay the state, then pay the private hospital.
The joke writes itself: American-level deductions on the payslip, Pakistani-level footpaths outside the gate. That joke is someone's daily commute, someone's child's asthma, someone's ruined shoes in monsoon sludge.
Government health spend reached 1.84% of GDP in 2021-22 (NHA). Still far below OECD peers.
Out-of-pocket health spending was 39.4% of total health spend in 2021-22 (down from 62.6% in 2014-15, but still huge).
Fuel taxes stay heavy even when global crude moves. Municipal corporations cry poor yet hawker fines rise.
9,438 pothole-linked deaths (2020-2024, MoRTH in Parliament)
Union Minister Nitin Gadkari told Parliament that potholes and road engineering defects killed 9,438 people between 2020 and 2024. That is not a typo. That is national accounting of preventable death.
2024 alone saw 2,385 such deaths in official replies cited by The Print and Times of India. A two-wheeler rider hits a hidden crater, a bus swerves, a car aquaplanes in a lake that used to be a lane. Names become statistics.
Tenders, contractors, and maintenance cycles are where money disappears. The asphalt you see on TV inaugurations does not always reach the ward lane where your mother walks to buy vegetables.
NCRB ADSI 2024: about 1.75 lakh road accident deaths. MoRTH reported about 1.77 lakh for the same year (method differs).
Two-wheeler riders accounted for 84,599 road deaths in 2024 (NCRB Crime in India, negligence cases).
Monsoon turns minor pits into swimming pools; drains blocked by garbage make it worse. Footpaths vanish for parking or shops.
Swachh Bharat changed toilet coverage on slides. Open dumping, burning waste, and choked drains still define many city mornings. You smell it before you see the municipal logo on the truck that never came.
Segregation rules exist in notifications. Landfills fire up in Ghazipur-style mountains while RWAs fight over where the bin should sit. The worker who picks your trash often works without gear, contract, or dignity.
Rain plus plastic-clogged drains equals flooded roads. Flooded roads plus potholes equals lost wages, damaged vehicles, and dengue season.
CPCB and city audits repeatedly flag untreated solid waste fractions.
Plastic ban announcements outrun enforcement in markets.
Lake and wetland encroachment worsens every monsoon flood headline.
17+ lakh deaths linked to PM2.5 pollution in 2022 (Lancet Countdown)
Delhi winter smog is the poster. The crisis is national: industrial belts, crop-burning windows, construction dust, and traffic fumes. School closures and air purifier sales are private coping. Public fix is slow.
Lancet Countdown 2025 estimated over 17 lakh deaths attributable to human-caused PM2.5 in India in 2022, with fossil fuels contributing to roughly 44% of those deaths. Petrol used in road transport alone was linked to about 2.69 lakh deaths in that report.
When breath kills at this scale, 'GDP growth' without clean air is a trade ordinary families never agreed to.
Most Indian cities remain far above WHO air-quality guidelines.
Children and elderly pay the highest price in hospital admissions.
Monitoring stations exist; enforcement on polluters lags.
51.2% of Class 5 children cannot read Class 2 text (ASER 2024)
Primary health centres without doctors. District hospitals without beds. You queue for hours, get a referral, then queue again. Ayushman cards help some cases. The rest sell jewellery for surgery.
ASER 2024 found 48.8% of Class 5 children nationally can read at Class 2 level. That means more than half still cannot. In government schools the share who can read is 44.8%. Recovery after COVID helped, but the baseline was already weak.
Education and health are where corruption hurts twice: money stolen from the budget, and futures stolen from the child.
Maternal Mortality Ratio: 88 per lakh live births (SRS 2021-23). Assam and poorer states remain far above Kerala.
Teacher vacancy and transfer mafias are state-level scandals repeating nationwide.
Low-cost private tuitions become a hidden second school fee for the poor.
NCRB records profession at death, not a court verdict on why someone died. Even with that limit, the farm-sector number stays enormous: 10,546 people engaged in farming died by suicide in 2024.
That includes 4,633 farmers/cultivators and 5,913 agricultural labourers. Maharashtra (3,824), Karnataka (2,971), and Madhya Pradesh (835) lead the list. At this pace, roughly one farm-sector suicide every hour continues year after year.
Crop failure, debt, water stress, and MSP fights are the background music in village India. A small dip from 10,786 in 2023 does not erase the grief in each household.
Farm-sector suicides were 6.2% of India's 1,70,746 total suicides in 2024.
Several states report 'zero' farm suicides in NCRB tables. Activists question under-recording.
Loan waivers make headlines. Cold storage, fair prices, and irrigation repair rarely keep pace.
35.5% of children under 5 are stunted (NFHS-5, 2019-21)
India runs anganwadis and midday meals on one channel, and malnutrition wards on another. NFHS-5 found 35.5% stunting, 19.3% wasting, and 32.1% underweight among children under five.
Numbers improved slightly from NFHS-4, but one in three small children still carries stunting. That is brain and body growth stolen before school even starts.
When food inflation hits and PDS leaks, the poorest mother pays twice: at the market and in the clinic.
Stunting fell from 38.4% (2015-16) to 35.5% (2019-21). Progress, but not victory.
Wasting at 19.3% signals acute malnutrition risk in many districts.
NFHS-6 data will update the picture when fully published.
Official PLFS data for January-December 2024 puts all-India unemployment at 3.2% on usual status and 4.9% on weekly status. That sounds low until you split urban and rural.
Urban unemployment stayed at 6.7%. Urban women at 8.2%. Young people queue for exams with lakhs of seats and crores of applicants. Gig work fills the gap without PF, leave, or dignity.
Rural 'employment' often hides underemployment: a family working a tiny plot for half the year and migrating for the other half.
Labour force participation for women remains far below men (PLFS 2024).
Contract, daily-wage, and informal work dominate vast sections of the workforce.
One exam paper leak can erase years of a student's preparation.
About 5.08 crore cases pending nationwide (Dec 2025, PIB)
As of 31 December 2025, PIB cited National Judicial Data Grid figures: 92,118 cases in the Supreme Court, 63.7 lakh in High Courts, and 4.43 crore in district and subordinate courts.
Land disputes, cheque bounce queues, and government litigation clog the system. The poor sit in court corridors while the powerful hire delay as a tactic.
Fast-track courts exist for headlines. Ordinary citizens still measure justice in years, not weeks.
Union law ministry told Parliament in March 2025 that over 5 crore cases were pending across courts (NJDG).
Government is itself a massive litigant. National Litigation Policy remains undecided.
Undertrials fill jails while trials crawl (see prisons section below).
112.7% national prison occupancy; 72.6% undertrials (NCRB PSI 2024)
NCRB Prison Statistics India 2024: 5.11 lakh inmates against sanctioned capacity of 4.53 lakh. National occupancy 112.7%. More than half of states and UTs run jails above capacity.
About 72.6% of prisoners are undertrials, people not convicted. Delhi reported about 194.6% occupancy, highest in the country.
Overcrowding means disease, violence, and broken rehabilitation. Families sell land for bail lawyers while cases sleep in court lists.
India has only 34 dedicated women jails (NCRB PSI 2024 coverage).
Staff vacancies in prison departments mirror police and court gaps.
India carries the world's largest TB burden. The India TB Report 2024 estimated 27.8 lakh TB cases and 3.2 lakh TB deaths in 2023 (WHO-accepted in-country model). That is roughly 26% of global TB deaths.
Dengue is seasonal terror in cities. NCVBDC official data: 2,33,519 dengue cases and 297 deaths in 2024. 2023 was worse on deaths (485). Monsoon drainage failure turns mosquitoes into a tax on the poor.
Outbreaks make news when hospitals overflow. Prevention funding dries up when cameras leave.
Dengue 2024: Bihar 16 deaths, Odisha and Delhi among high counts (NCVBDC table).
TB 'missing cases' fell to about 2.3 lakh in 2023 but untreated infection still spreads.
Heat plus stagnant water plus garbage equals double disease hit every summer.
Heat, floods, lightning: climate hits the poor first
3,200+ deaths from extreme weather in 2024 (IMD annual summary)
IMD's Annual Climate Summary 2024 recorded 3,200+ deaths from extreme weather. Lightning and thunderstorms: 1,374 deaths. Floods and heavy rain: 1,287. Heat waves: 459.
Separately, the health ministry told Parliament that 374 confirmed heatstroke deaths and 67,637 suspected heatstroke cases were recorded between March and July 2024. Independent media tallies often report higher heat death counts than official heatstroke registers.
2024 was India's warmest year in nationwide records since 1901. Farm workers, construction crews, and slum roofs take the hit while AC sales boom.
Bihar led lightning deaths; Kerala led flood deaths in IMD's 2024 breakdown.
Urban flooding from concretised cities is now an annual emergency, not a surprise.
Disaster compensation reaches late; rent and repair bills arrive immediately.
India reported 1,70,746 suicides in 2024, slightly down from 1,71,418 in 2023. The rate is still about 12.2 per lakh population. Cities run hotter at 16.3 per lakh.
NCRB lists family problems (33.5%) and illness (17.9%) among leading recorded causes. Ages 18-30 account for the highest share of suicide deaths.
Students, farmers, and daily-wage workers appear in separate tables, but the human story is the same: pressure without support, shame without helplines that work at 2 a.m.
Daily wage earners and unemployed categories remain large in NCRB profession tables.
Mental health spend and counsellors in schools stay thin outside elite bubbles.
Helplines exist. Trust and local follow-up often do not.
52 sewer/septic tank deaths in 2024 (NCSK data cited in media)
The law bans manual scavenging. The government often claims zero manual scavenging deaths because it classifies deaths differently from 'hazardous cleaning' of sewers and septic tanks without safety gear.
Outlook and NHRC-cited data from the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis recorded 52 such deaths in 2024 and 63 in 2023. NCSK's long-term register crosses 1,200 deaths since 1993.
Workers enter manholes with bare hands while officers talk Swachh Bharat on stage. Compensation reaches families late. Cases against contractors die in slow courts.
377 hazardous sewer/septic tank deaths reported 2019-2023 in one Parliament reply.
58,098 manual scavengers identified in 2013 and 2018 surveys; fresh surveys claim none left.
Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, UP, and Delhi among states with highest recorded sewer deaths over decades.
BPRD's Data on Police Organizations reported 21.35% vacancy at all-India level as of 1 January 2023. Ten states had more than 25% posts empty. West Bengal (39.42%), Mizoram (35.06%), and Haryana (31.86%) topped the list.
UN guidance suggests about 222 police per lakh people. India's actual strength was about 155 per lakh against sanctioned 197 (BPRD cited in Business Standard).
Fewer boots on ground means slower FIRs, heavier overtime, and more frustration when a woman walks home at night.
UP and Bihar, two of India's most populous states, reported about 26-29% vacancy.
CAPFs also run with sanctioned-vs-actual gaps in the same BPRD series.
Recruitment rallies make news. Retention, housing, and modern forensics lag.
10.1 million working children aged 5-14 (Census 2011, latest official national count)
India has not published a full Census since 2011. That is itself a civic failure. The last official national count found 10.1 million children aged 5-14 working as main or marginal workers, plus more than 42.7 million children out of school.
You still see children in tea stalls, brick kilns, and home workshops. Raids happen. Rehabilitation stays uneven. The 2016 child labour law tightened rules but enforcement varies by state.
Until a new Census lands, activists and ILO use 2011 plus sample surveys. Treat newer viral numbers as estimates unless sourced.
UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and MP accounted for about 55% of working children in Census 2011.
Urban child labour rose between 2001 and 2011 even as rural numbers fell.
Midday meals and RTE helped enrollment, but dropout and invisible work remain.
Summer load-shedding still hits tier-2 towns and villages while bills rise. Smart meter fights are the new front in the same old story: pay more, get less predictable supply.
Public buses are crowded, unsafe for many women, and thinning on routes where tickets do not cover diesel. Metros beautify one corridor while last-mile walks have no lights.
Rent eats half a worker's wage. PMAY helped some households; millions still live in kutcha houses that flood every monsoon.
DISCOM debt cycles repeat with tariff hikes.
Railway bridge and platform overcrowding remain daily risk.
Urban flooding from concretised cities is now an annual emergency, not a surprise.
6.55 crore people in slums (Census 2011, latest official national count)
India has not run a full Census since 2011. That year counted 6.55 crore people in slums: 1.37 crore slum households across 2,613 towns. That was 17.4% of urban India.
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, UP, Tamil Nadu, and MP carry the largest slum populations. You see it daily: open drains next to glass towers, one tap for fifty families, fires in tarpaulin lanes.
PMAY-U and slum rehabilitation schemes show numbers on paper. On ground, eviction without resettlement still breaks lives.
MoHUA Rajya Sabha data still cites Census 2011 slum breakup for policy.
Slum literacy was 77.7% in 2011 Census slum report; jobs and water stay the fight.
No updated national slum headcount until Census runs again.
1,435 structure collapse deaths in 2024 (NCRB ADSI)
Cheap cement, illegal floors, and ignored inspection kill quietly. NCRB ADSI 2024 recorded 1,435 deaths from collapse of structures nationwide, plus 30 deaths from bridge collapse.
Every monsoon brings another headline: a wall, a balcony, a under-construction tower. Tenants rarely know the building violated plan.
Municipal files hold the approvals. Survivors hold the funerals.
2023 recorded 1,587 structure collapse deaths (NCRB series).
Factory and construction-site deaths add separate ADSI categories.
RTI on structural audits after each local collapse is citizen work.
17,029 deaths from falls/collisions on tracks (NCRB 2024)
Headlines focus on big train accidents. Daily death is quieter: people falling off locals, crossing tracks, crowding on footboards. NCRB 2024 counted 17,029 such deaths, plus 5,384 on railway premises and 1,888 at level crossings.
Deccan Herald summed railway-track and premises incidents at about 22,413 deaths in 2024 from NCRB data. Maharashtra's suburban network carries a huge share of track deaths.
No major train collision in 2024 is cold comfort if the platform still kills every week.
NCRB reported zero classified 'train collision' deaths in 2024 while track deaths stayed massive.
Festival season spikes as migrants board moving trains.
Foot-overbridges and platform capacity lag decades behind ridership.
23.3% of women married before 18 (NFHS-5, 2019-21)
Child marriage is illegal. NFHS-5 still found 23.3% of women aged 20-24 had married before 18. Rural prevalence (26.8%) runs higher than urban (15%). Poorest quintile: about 40%.
That is not history. That is today's aunties fixing matches for fifteens while phones scroll Instagram.
Girls who marry early drop out, face early pregnancy, and lose bargaining power forever.
Younger cohort (18-19) showed 16.3% already married in NFHS-5 analysis (UNFPA).
Bihar, West Bengal, and Tripura remain among high-prevalence states.
Law exists. Panchayat and family enforcement is the gap.
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is meant for terror. Parliament's own data shows 10,440 arrests from 2019 to 2023 but only 335 convictions in that window. Bail stays hard by design.
Home Ministry told Lok Sabha that NCRB does not maintain how many accused are presently in jail under UAPA, or for how long. So the public gets arrests and convictions, not the waiting in between.
649 UAPA cases were registered in 2024, the lowest in a decade per Business Standard on NCRB data. That is not the same as justice for those already inside.
2023 alone: 2,914 UAPA arrests; about 42% in Jammu and Kashmir (NDTV on MoS reply).
National conviction rate on completed cases stayed near 4% in 2023 in same reporting.
Undertrials nationwide remain 72.6% of prisoners (NCRB PSI 2024). UAPA adds to that fog.
None of this fixes itself because a politician tweeted a festival greeting. Water, food, roads, and safety improve when budgets are honest, contracts are open, inspectors exist, and citizens keep paper trails: photos, RTI, CPGRAMS, local complaints.
Trishola's job is to give you sources and tools, not sell hope. Share this page when someone says 'India is shining' and your lane is still dark. Demand ward-level fixes. Name the department. Attach proof.
Party-neutral does not mean accepting failure. It means the fight belongs to every citizen, not only one election season.
Photograph potholes and file municipal complaints with date stamps.
Use FSSAI helpline and state food safety portals for adulteration.
RTI on ward water testing, road repair tenders, health centre rosters, and court pendency.
Share this page when someone says everything is fine and your lane is still dark.
