Fire outbreaks in Delhi and Rajkot: A criminal abdication

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 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. The emerging details of Saturday’s 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. 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. 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. 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.

Part four of the National Building Code, which runs into more than 80 pages, has detailed directions on how to prevent fire hazards. Many states, including Delhi and Gujarat, also have their own fire safety rules. But fire safety operations fall under municipalities, a tier of governance whose weaknesses have multiplied in recent times. 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. In 2021, for instance, after a blaze killed 10 babies in a hospital 60 km from Nagpur, a Maharashtra public health department audit of 484 hospitals in the state found that more than 80 per cent did not have a fire safety clearance. In late March this year, after it was evident that large parts of the country were staring at a heatwave, the Union Health Ministry and the National Disaster Management Authority issued fire safety guidelines that gave particular emphasis to healthcare facilities. It called for comprehensive inspections of all hospitals — significant because healthcare facilities use chemicals and many patient care items, like oxygen cylinders, are either inflammable or can escalate flames. These guidelines have not received their due attention.