Context

Two devastating fire incidents in less than 12 hours, which have snuffed out lives, many of them children, including, most heartbreakingly, newborns at a pediatric hospital in Delhi, are reminders of the shockingly low priority accorded to basic safety measures in Indian cities.

Fire Outbreaks in India

• Failure in Fire Preparedness: Fire Preparedness is a well-developed discipline in most parts of the world.
  • Yet outbreak after outbreak in the last three decades has highlighted the failure to learn from it and bring it into the design of public spaces, housing apartments, hospitals, commercial and office complexes.
• Recent Fires: The emerging details of recent fire at a Rajkot indoor gaming centre evoke a terrible déjà vu.
  • The centre did not have a no-objection certificate from fire safety authorities, it had only one route for entry and exit and welding work was underway during business hours. 
• Judicial Involvement: The Gujarat High Court has taken suo motu cognisance of the tragedy and asked the state government as well as the Rajkot, Surat and Ahmedabad municipalities to submit a report on the functioning of gaming centres in these cities.
• Government Investigation: A Delhi government investigation into the cause of the fire that claimed at least six lives in the early hours of Sunday is also underway.
  • Justice must be served in the two cases but it’s time that larger failures that lead to avoidable fatalities are addressed.
• Significanct Cases: Buildings in the country continue to be tinder boxes despite the all too similar conclusions of past investigations – be it the Uphaar Cinema tragedy in Delhi in 1997 or the Bengaluru residential complex blaze of 2010, the Kamala Mills inferno of 2017, Kolkata’s AMRI hospital fire in 2011 or outbreaks in hospitals during the Covid pandemic.

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Fire Safety Mechanism

• National Building Code: Part four of the National Building Code, which runs into more than 80 pages, has detailed directions on how to prevent fire hazards.
• Fire Safety Rules: Many states, including Delhi and Gujarat, also have their own fire safety rules.
• Fire Safety Operations: But fire safety operations fall under municipalities, a tier of governance whose weaknesses have multiplied in recent times.
• Inspections: Inspections are weak and, at best, once-in-a-few- years exercises.
  • This means that very often it requires a tragedy to uncover flagrant violations.
• Infrastructure: A FICCI-Pinkerton study of 2018 flagged that urban India has less than 40 per cent of the fire stations it needs.
• Lack of Modernisation: Two years later, the 15th Finance Commission underlined the need to modernise the country’s firefighting infrastructure.
• Over-Population: A rapidly urbanising country, with closely packed population clusters, cannot continue to pay short shrift to fire safety.

Conclusion

Addressing systemic failures in fire preparedness and enforcing strict safety regulations are crucial to prevent avoidable tragedies and ensure public safety in rapidly urbanizing areas.

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