A quarter century ago, fire in a closed hall was emblematic of the case against free speech as an absolute right: yelling ‘fire’ in an enclosed space packed with people could cause stampede fatalities. In mid-1997, a real blaze at a Delhi movie theatre called Uphaar took 59 lives in a tragedy held up back then as a sign of much that was wrong with Indian civic security. The tragedy led to a trail of revelations, with sundry lapses and word of jammed fire exits sparking a furore, and was followed by a judicial spectacle that scorched the Ansal Group of developers behind the cinema hall and was interpreted as a wake-up call that India badly needed. It was an abject lesson: playing fast and loose with safety norms was playing with fire. Urban rules were tightened and legal consequences played up. On Monday, a local court held Sushil and Gopal Ansal of the real-estate group guilty of tampering with evidence in the Uphaar case and handed each a 7-year jail term and fine of ₹2.25 crore. In 2015, our apex court had fined them ₹30 crore each for criminal negligence and released them from prison, where they had spent a few months. In the latest twist, a separate charge was upheld. Yet, whether we are generally safer today than 24 years ago remains doubtful.
On the same day as the Ansal ruling, four infants lost their lives to a fire at Bhopal’s Kamla Nehru Hospital. Shortly earlier, 11 people died similarly in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar District Hospital. As many as 55 deaths within 10 months can be traced to hospital flare-ups in that state. All-India official records show that while our total count of fire accidents fell 40% from 2015 to 2019, we still had much too high a fatality rate. At over 10,000 deaths a year, India must perform better. Our safety guidelines, where they exist, are sketchy, while adherence and enforcement are both weak. Even a small sample would reveal that builders comply too variably with our National Building Code of 2016, on which state-level codes were to be modelled. Though upmarket constructions often get all their clearances and go beyond the list of must-dos, many still falter on keeping inbuilt safety systems in working condition. Routine checks and drills are conspicuous by their scarcity. We must update all codes to mandate vulnerability audits and enforce the closure of gaps. The need for hospitals to store oxygen, for example, puts them at higher risk. Protocols must therefore be calibrated by varied levels of exposure to fire mishaps. The top court had asked for fire-safety audits of all covid facilities, but it is unclear if it was done.
Audit-wise, special attention must be paid to electrical wiring, jumbles of which are a hazard that too many estate managers would rather camouflage than address. Casual disregard for loose ends and electric sparks is so observably common in the country that we have even attained global notoriety for it. Some years ago, we responded with indignation to a joke on this cracked by a British royal, but it rang true. Sadly, it still does. What our authorities should fix most urgently, however, is their neglect of fire services. Across the country, they are understaffed, poorly funded and ill equipped for our vastly transformed urban spaces. In 2019, the Centre issued a model bill on these services for states to adopt. It had a few welcome tweaks, but financial outlays to upgrade fire departments have stayed insufficient. This, too, amounts to playing with fire.