After Surat, safety thoughts

Before his first speech (in Gujarat) after the ruling BJP’s victory, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was heard paying homage to the young students who died in the Surat fire. The latest calamity in a so-called “commercial complex” occurred in what was a virtual tinderbox ready to explode and consume workers, or in this case young students at tuition classes. Such unplanned use of workspaces inside any commercial building is a mockery of not only building rules but also defies rules on maintaining basic firefighting equipment. A survey of most multi-tenant buildings would show the callous ways in which electricity is drawn through haphazard wiring, without a care for power load. Such ad-hoc arrangements are a virtual invitation to short-circuits and a fire catastrophe in crowded working spaces in cities, where rents and costs are invariably high.

There are two aspects of safety where Indians are notoriously lax — fire safety and firefighting. While modern fire-retardant chemicals are freely available in the market, very few invest in them. The basic Indian instinct is to avoid any extra expenditure on safety or in insuring places and people living or working there. On firefighting, any audit would reveal that even the most modern buildings, with heavy airconditioning requiring ducts that are natural conduits for the spreading of fire, hardly have sprinklers. It’s likely that most fire extinguishers would be out of date, and India’s outdated firefighting system is reflected in forlorn red buckets of sand, that are sometimes the only protection in crowded public spaces. Making a fresh start, the government can insist on fire insurance before granting commercial spaces licences, as well as tighten fire safety regulations and building occupancy rules.