No accountability has made India world’s calamity capital

Instead of the faceless and powerless Indian paying with his life, it is time our political and bureaucratic classes were made accountable

- RASHME SEHGAL

Have we become the calamity capital of the world? So it would seem, as we lurch from one disaster to another. The death toll from these accidents keeps rising, and yet alarm bells are seldom triggered loud enough for our ‘deaf’ authorities to take timely and preventive actions.

The latest disaster to have shocked the country was the recent fire at the Birch by Romeo Lane nightclub in north Goa, which left 25 people dead. It turned out the local Arpora-Nagoa panchayat had issued a demolition notice against its illegal construction in April last year, but the Luthra brothers managed to put pressure on the Directorate of Panchayats and got it stayed. Complaints by local residents warning of this ‘unsafe structure’ that violated the norms laid out by the Goa Coastal Zone Management also went unheeded, and when the local Anjuna police station issued notices to the owners to show their licences and safety permits, the move was blocked by their seniors. A magisterial inquiry is underway to investigate and fix official responsibility for this negligence, but once again it seems to be a case of too little too late.

The NCRB data shows that India records 1.5 lakh fire incidents annually, resulting in over 27,000 deaths, whose most vulnerable victims are children. The most frightening aspect of these disasters is that 57 per cent of these deaths occur in residential settings, with most of these incidents occurring at night or in the early hours of the morning when the occupants are asleep and reaction time is slow.