Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People

The Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People (Uttar Pradesh Mritak Sangh) is a northern Indian pressure group that seeks to reclaim the legal rights of those falsely listed by the government as being dead.

In the overcrowded regions of Uttar Pradesh, many have resorted to bribing officials to have the owner of a plot declared deceased and the land transferred to their ownership. The process to undo this is long, arduous, as well as often hopelessly inefficient and corrupt — not to mention that those least able to fight back make excellent victims. The Association seeks to reverse the declarations, call attention to the problem and prevent others from being exploited in similar fashion.

The founder and president is Lal Bihari, who was "dead" from 1976 to 1994 and used the word Mritak (Dead) in his name during the period.

The issue has been extensively discussed by prominent personalities who visited the remote villages and experienced first hand the issues facing the people declared dead.

Famous quotes containing the words association, dead and/or people:

    The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.
    Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)

    Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
    And stab my spirit broad awake;
    Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
    Choose thou, before that spirit die,
    A piercing pain, a killing sin,
    And to my dead heart run them in!
    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

    What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)