On the night of 8 July, more than seven hundred persons died in the swirling, turbid waters of the Meghna river southeast of Dhaka. The ferry, the Nasrin-1, sank to the muddy depths just below the point where the Meghna is joined by the Padma (Ganga). Only a handful of bodies were found. The knowledge of impending death as the triple-storey ship tilted and filled with water would have left the children, women and men screaming in the darkness.
Ferryboat deaths in Bangladesh, as we all know, fail to hold attention. The same as landslide deaths in Nepal, Andhra fishermen lost at sea, Bihar miners buried underground, or Karachi pedestrians killed in a hail of bullets. But when it comes to in the case of the Bangladeshis lost in the sea or river, the numbers are so much more. The ship that capsized on 8 July carried twice as many passengers as a fully loaded Boeing 747.
Once, a Unicef chief – James Grant – tried to shake up his Kathmandu audience by graphically describing child mortality in the country as equivalent to so many widebody aircrafts crashing into the mountains every day. But even that did not work.
News coverage of death is a class thing. When there are too many lives, life is cheap. And when the lives are poor, it becomes cheaper still. Supply and demand in the reporting of the dead and dying.