Fires in cities are more common than we think. We see these massive fires that claim several lives as few and far between. The gruesome cases in Rajkot and Delhi recently, following one after the other, are a wake-up call for anyone invested in the question of the future of our cities. The news always has a way of weighing the gravity of such events against the number of people who lost their lives. In these two fires, the shock value also comes from the fact that children and infants lost their lives. But there is more to these fires than we tend to see.
The immediate focus has, rightly so, turned to negligence, greed and poor compliance. We collectively rage against the corruption, the lack of political will, and profit-driven greed that contribute to such tragedies. We outrage against the rich people who turned a blind eye to public safety like we did in the case of the infamous Uphaar Cinema tragedy. Or we peg it to poor regulatory bodies and laws. It is seen as an issue of a lack of enforcement — marred both by an inept governance system, but also by the vast, uncontrolled urban sprawl that is equally hard to regulate.
In the Rajkot case, the Gujarat High Court has come down heavily on the state government for overlooking the fact that these establishments have been running without any state permits all this while. It has also led to some high-level transfers. All of these actions may be valid and much needed, but the solution to these problems needs more.
Courts, sometimes swayed by outrage, come down with a particularly heavy hand. In M C Mehta v Union of India (1996), the court was dealing with air pollution in Delhi. It ordered the mass sealing of unauthorised buildings. These make up for a majority of Delhi’s built environment. Not only did they come back, they came back exactly the same. Such high-handedness of law rarely works.
While outrage is often useful in bringing urgency to important issues, it comes with the danger of easy, quick fixes. Outrage papers over the everyday-ness of these fires and possibly other urban disasters. Fires break out almost every second day. In informal factories. In slum settlements. But also, in fancy restaurants and shopping malls.
According to a report, almost 800 factory fires were recorded in the last two years in Delhi alone. We don’t notice most. With heat waves in our cities, the threat of fires looms large and will soon become a major concern to deal with.
In 2019, one such massive fire broke out in Delhi’s Anaj Mandi, inside a bag factory, that claimed the lives of 45 migrant workers sleeping inside. Informal factories that work out of small hovels, often deal in flammable raw materials which constantly put their lives in danger. Fire safety does not keep them awake at night. Making ends meet does.
The problem with fire safety needs to be charted on a much bigger drawing map that deals with more than just plain regularity and irregularity, corruption and negligence. Our urban fabric is increasingly becoming unequal, ghettoised and therefore all the more unsafe. Not only do most low-income areas have very poor infrastructure that is more susceptible to fires, their narrow lanes can not accommodate big fire trucks. The range of reasons why fire safety is not adhered to in the most elite spaces, to how most of our living spaces in the city continue to be susceptible to fires, reveal to us a deeper, structural issue. Why is fire safety not on anyone’s agenda, sometimes even those whose lives are threatened by it?
Fire safety needs to be understood through a larger, longer understanding of how our cities have changed and how precarity of all kinds has increased. People’s susceptibility to fire is also tied to a range of other issues. The point is that “stronger laws” are not always the resolution. The resolution does not lie in pulling down all unauthorised, illegal structures ever built and replacing them with “proper” housing and commercial establishments. There is a need to understand why enforcement of these laws and regulations is difficult. Fire safety is not an isolated issue from the bigger perils of urban planning. It is just one more hazard, among many, that people continue to live with.
The writer is faculty of social sciences, NLSIU Bangalore
