The Delhi inferno

AFTER the initial outpouring of shock and anger over a major fire and the announcement of compensation for the victims and their families, it is generally business as usual. Friday’s inferno that raged through a building in Delhi’s Mundka, leaving at least 27 charred to death, is likely to be no exception. Unfortunately, such tragedies keep recurring in our country. The statistics and surveys reveal a scalding story: from 2016 to 2020, fire accidents have, on an average, claimed 35 lives a day in India. The global figures, as per an analysis published in the Global Diseases Burden, show that India accounted for every fifth of the 1.2 lakh fire-related deaths in the world in 2017.

Shameful as this is, more appalling is the fact that we don’t seem to learn from these catastrophes. Though fire safety and prevention rules have been tightened to ensure secure buildings, the frequency of structures bursting into flames for various reasons remains unabated. A day after the Delhi incident, a blaze broke out at a hospital in Amritsar; there was no casualty as the patients were evacuated. Such cases expose the criminal neglect in the implementation of fire safety norms. Be it a residential building, a business establishment or a hospital (as was tragically evident during the pandemic when many medical centres reported fatal fires), most cases betray the same laxity: non-adherence to fire-proofing or emergency protocol.

No doubt, this points the finger at the owners of the buildings. However, equally liable for the high incidence of conflagrations are officials and departments that give clearances to unsafe structures. This has become all the more necessary as urban spaces squeeze further to accommodate the teeming migrants from smaller towns and villages. At times, even fire brigade engines and NDRF teams on rescue missions find it difficult to navigate their way in, so congested and unplanned are some colonies. The less said the better of the illegal structures that have sprouted all over the country, in the hope of eventually getting ‘legalised’. One shudders to think how many of us are sitting on veritable tinderboxes.

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