Fifty-seven-year-old Lal Bihari has spent a significant part of his adult life being dead on paper. In fact he grew so used to his expired identity that he became known as Lal Bihari “Mritak” – “dead man.” In his village of Amilo, Uttar Pradesh, people on the streets simply call him “Mritak.”

Bihari is not the only mritak. He is among the thousands who have been unlawfully registered as dead in government records by their relatives in order to capture their land and property. This often happens with the connivance of local officials.

Bihari fought for 18 years and managed to reclaim his identity in 1994. His fight hasn’t stopped. He became a fulltime activist to help those who face the same plight that he did – being stripped of an identity and land rights.

In February this year, on the eve of assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Bihari received a response to a Right to Information (RTI) petition that he’d lodged about a month earlier. The government informed him that 221 people across the state had been reinstated as “alive” – they were no longer deemed to be “dead.”

The released information also stated that officials who were found to have colluded with the victims’ relatives would be prosecuted. And those signed back to life would be entitled to their rightful share of family land and property.

It is Bihari’s long, arduous and largely solitary battle against the administration – both in and out of the courts – that has prompted the state government to become serious about tackling such cases.

In early March, I went to meet Bihari in the small village of Amilo, in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district, a region that is infamous for being the native place of notorious gangster Abu Salem. Known for its culture of crime, this eastern belt is commonly called the Badlands, and has been the setting for gritty Bollywood movies such as Omkara, which tell the stories of men who end up on the wrong side of the law. In the recently held assembly elections, about one third of the total candidates had criminal charges against them. Some of them won handsomely.

Posters of candidates who contested these elections dot the walls in Azamgarh along the dusty road to the marketplace in Amilo. As I pull up in an autorickshaw, Bihari flags it down. A short, stout man dressed in a worn-out safari suit, Bihari’s manner is brisk and business-like. He takes me along to a barber’s shop where we have tea. Inside the shop men read newspapers and discuss the election results. People are friendly towards him. Bihari is well-known in these parts, a hero for some. But for the local officials and the families of the dispossessed that he challenges, he poses a menace.

According to the government’s RTI responses to petitions filed by Bihari – the other was in 2008 and indicated that 335 dead people had been declared “alive” – over 500 people have been recognised as living individuals.

“I suspect that many more have been declared ‘alive’ but they [the government] are not giving information about all the cases officially to save guilty officials,” Bihari says.

Three decades ago, after he was declared dead by the local administration, Bihari founded Mritak Sangh(meaning “Dead Man’s Association”), a banner under which he fought his own case, and which has latterly served as a nodal point for other “dead” people. “Sometimes they contact me on their own. I have my own ways to find out about such cases too,” he says.

He remains its sole full-time member, keeping tabs on fictitious deaths, fighting on behalf of these living dead by assisting with court cases and guiding them through the bureaucratic processes, and working tirelessly to keep the issue burning.

It’s Bihari’s commitment and the ludicrous nature of his own case that has earned him the attention of the media and citations for his work in human rights. As an expert on this matter, his fame has travelled beyond the region. A few years ago, there were talks of Satish Kaushik, a Bollywood film director, expressing interest in making a film about Bihari’s life. “I have also been consulted by a Supreme Court lawyer who was fighting a similar case,” Bihari says.

But from the time of his own “death,” Bihari was plunged into a Kafkaesque administrative and social nightmare, one which he can’t completely escape because of his dedication to the “deceased” as an activist, which is rooted in his own personal story of suffering. “My children call me crazy because I could not do anything for them. They tell me that no one respects me, neither the government nor society. My time to earn money is already over. My son is particularly upset because I sold some of my land also to finance my struggle,” Bihari says.

And for the other individuals like Bihari, the social stigma and other complications caused by the administrative wrongdoings are hardly erased by the government’s decision of pronouncing them alive, and continue to impact their lives.