The price of a person

It would sound a little bit awkward, but for those who have gone through such a situation, would say, well this is just a life what you can do.

In an astonishing revelation which was recently published in a newspaper based outside India, it asked what is the price of an Afghan. How would you define or measure the value of a person – by beauty, by height, jobs, race, caste, nationality? The answer is as simple as you think, i.e. it could be

anything depending what you decide better. Yes, it could also be true that if Mr Shahrukh Khan is arrested or detained again in a London airport, it would make headlines across India, if not in United Kingdom, than someone like me!

Now, if these are the deciding factors, what about Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gurjarat, who was not given visa to participate in a Gujarat Summit in United States few years ago? Why there is a law, a constitution which says everyone is equal in the eye of the law?

The answer is all are not equal in the eye of law.

However, if you agree with the theory of natural law, no one can deny to the fact that all human life is of infinite value. If you put one human life on one side of a scale, and the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally.

Most of us would say that Jai Kishan who is a rickshaw- wallah in Chandni Chawk, Delhi, is worth the same as Shahrukh Khan.

Isn't that what all believe?

Now, look at this. The Ministry of Defence, the Government of United Kingdom, has been paying compensation to Afghans for accidentally killing their children, their brothers and sisters, or their parents, during the present low-level war in Afghanistan. Thanks to a freedom of information request

the newspaper further mentioned how much the MoD has paid families when a member has been killed.

Here are some examples: a daughter hit by shrapnel from air-strike and later died of injuries, $1,000; mother killed during bombing, $5,000; two brothers and two sons killed by hellfire missile strike, $32,000. The variation in the  figures is not explained, but in no case was more than $8,000 (about £5,000), paid for the loss of a single life.

Again, look at the value of a British life. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), UK, assesses drugs and other medical treatments for cost-effectiveness and recommends whether they should be supplied on the National Health Service (NHS). The key factual question is

how much the treatment costs for each quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, gained. A QALY is one year of life of good quality, or its equivalent, which might be a longer period of life of lower quality. The Nice then tells you that while decisions are made on a case by case basis, "generally … if a

treatment costs more than £20,000-30,000 per QALY, then it would not be considered cost effective".

Remember, that sum is per QALY, not per life saved. So if one has to take the bottom line of this range, Nice recommends that the NHS pay up to four times as much to extend the life of a British citizen by just one year, as the MoD is prepared to pay in compensation for killing a child or young person. That young person could – even allowing for Afghanistan's dismal life expectancy – expect to live another 40 reasonably good-quality years. That suggests an answer to the question with which I started in the beginning: it takes about 4 x 40, or 160 Afghan lives, to be worth the same as one British life!

According to international price comparisons that would not be the right answer, because £5,000 will be much figure in Afghanistan than it would be in Britain – perhaps four or five times as much. We can say five times. Even with that adjustment, it is, now, going to take 32 Afghan lives to be worth the same as one British life.

Here, there is nothing unique about the UK in this respect. The paper has further reported that the US generally pays no more than $2,500 in compensation for the loss of an Afghan life. In contrast, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States Government had set up a ‘Victim Compensation Fund’. The average payment it made to families of victims was $1.8m! Adjusting for purchasing power at a 5:1 ratio suggest that the US regards the life of an American as equivalent to the lives of 144 Afghans.

Look at the suggestion, what would happen if the Nato or Western forces really took seriously the idea of the equal value of all human life? They would then have to compensate Afghans for the civilian deaths and injuries they are causing at the same level as they would compensate their own citizens. That would serve three important purposes. First, it would demonstrate to the Afghans that the Nato forces truly respect them as equals. Second, the troops themselves might start to see Afghans as more like them, and have a new respect for the people they are trying to aid. Third, a dramatic increase in the costs of endangering the lives and limbs of civilians might foster a new restraint, because no military force wants to drain its own resources. The result would then be that fewer civilians would be killed – surely a very good thing, both for the civilians themselves, and for winning over the support of Afghans.

If it is the case, would our government convene a meeting to fix a new price for a person, when he got killed either by plane crash or train accident or killed by Naxalites or security forces, so that we can say proudly all are equal in the eyes of law, even if someone can’t become a Shahrukh Khan or Narendra Modi.