बेबाक · Editorial
From SBI's Loans to Odisha's Snakebites: The Unequal Protection of the Citizen
In recent reports, harsh loans for small borrowers, unsafe settlements and delayed snakebite treatment reveal a state that can guard the powerful more readily than the ordinary citizen.
The Week's Ledger
Read together, recent reports describe one subject from many angles: how the Indian state treats the citizen who cannot command its attention. The Supreme Court criticised the State Bank of India for harsh loan processing for individuals while being lenient with large loans. The Bombay High Court ordered the State to protect former judge Justice Patel, his wife and daughter in Mumbai. In Delhi, the civic body recorded 217 demolitions and 237 properties sealed. In Chennai, twelve cases of sexual assault on women and children surfaced in twenty-four hours. In Odisha, snakebite deaths raised alarm as delayed treatment beyond the golden hour claimed lives during the monsoon season. Different datelines, one question: for whom does the state actually work?
Two Indias At The Counter
The democratic promise is equal protection; the practice, too often, is graded protection. The same institutions can be swift and solicitous for the influential, slow or severe for the ordinary. The apex court's own words — that banks are 'casual' with big loans yet subject common borrowers to 'borderline harassment' — name the asymmetry precisely. It is not that the state never acts. It demolishes, it seals, it processes paperwork with diligence. The question is whether that diligence reaches where the citizen is most exposed: a child in a worker settlement, a person bitten by a snake, a common borrower at a loan counter who has no lobby and no leverage.
The Case For The State
In fairness, the state's defenders can point to real constraints and real action. A bank must price risk, and large credit is not automatically a favour; enforcement against illegal construction protects public safety, and the Delhi figures — 330 show-cause notices and 91 demolition orders — show process, not mere impulse. Police cannot post a constable beside every child. Snakebite is a medical race against time that no government wholly wins. Each of these is true. Yet the strongest version of the official case still concedes the decisive point: capacity is finite, so the real test is priority. A republic reveals its values not in what it lacks, but in whom it chooses to serve first.
What The Record Shows
Weigh the documented record. In Chennai, twelve cases of sexual assault on women and children in a single day went alongside residents' concern for children in worker settlements, where many parents leave for work early in the morning and return only in the evening. In Odisha, experts warn that more lives are being lost to snakebites than to many natural disasters, with delayed treatment beyond the golden hour proving fatal as the monsoon season begins. Set beside the apex court's criticism of lopsided lending practices at the State Bank of India, the pattern is not anecdote but architecture: protection flows toward those who already have voice, and thins exactly where vulnerability is greatest.
The Verdict
The verdict is not that India's institutions have failed — several, this week, did their job. The Bombay High Court ordered protection for a former judge and his family; the Supreme Court spoke for the small borrower; a civic body acted on unsafe buildings. The failure is one of sequencing and of reach. When the same energy that seals 237 properties is not matched by timely snakebite treatment within the golden hour, or by stronger security for children in worker settlements, the state has confused activity with equity. Competence plainly exists. It is simply pointed, too often, away from the citizen who needs it most and toward interests already able to protect themselves.
A Way Forward
The correction is concrete and within reach. Bank regulators should require lenders to publish, and act on, grievance-resolution times for common borrowers alongside those for large ones, so the asymmetry the Supreme Court named is measured and closed. Snakebite-prone districts should treat access to timely treatment during the golden hour as a service standard before each monsoon, not a phrase. Demolition drives must be tied to fair process, and police deployment to the settlements where assault data, not influence, says risk is highest. Equal protection cannot merely be declared; it must be budgeted, staffed and audited. That, not another crackdown, is how a republic keeps faith with its smallest citizen.
A republic is tested not in how it indulges the powerful, but in whether the smallest citizen — borrower, child, snakebite victim — gets the same protection as the largest.
Your Constitutional Rights
What the Constitution guarantees in this storyNo person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except by a fair, just and reasonable procedure established by law — read by the courts to include dignity, privacy, health, a clean environment and livelihood.
Fundamental RightThe State shall regard raising the level of nutrition and public health as among its primary duties.
Directive PrincipleThe State shall, within its capacity, secure the right to work, education and public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement.
Directive PrincipleSuperintendence, direction and control of elections vests in an independent Election Commission of India.
ConstitutionalWhat this editorial rests on
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An editorial is the considered opinion of The Mudda desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions and actors; we do not endorse or attack any political party. "The Mudda's Ask" is a citizen's good-faith policy proposal, grounded in the Constitution — not the platform of any party. Translations are faithful — no fact is added in any language. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →