The Kamala Mills fire, which took place on December 28, has left the city scarred. It is not just the tragedy that has struck this time but the gaping hole in fire safety in the city that has been revealed through it that has the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) grappling to snip off loose ends. One way in which the BMC has taken strict action has been through the demolition of illegal encroachments, not just in Kamala Mills but also in the rest of the city.
Another measure, this one taken by the Mumbai police, is the ban of Chinese Lanterns till January 22. The measure was taken especially to avoid fire hazards during the New Years when many a Mumbaikar makes a stop at Marine Drive to light these lanterns. While this hazard may have been mitigated, other firecrackers did burst this New Years. Also, these lanterns are a year-round phenomenon in the city, with vendors pacing the lengths of Marine Drive and Carter Road looking for customers who will light a couple and send them afloat over the sea. And they manage to find quite a few takers.
“Banning just Chinese lanterns is random and makes no sense when one looks at the bigger picture. I don’t see this as a full-fledged response to the Kamala Mills fire, just a sort of quick reaction,” says social thinker and columnist Shiv Vishvanathan. “I don’t see any dialogue to prevent these kinds of fires taking place again, just politics. Unfortunately, even the politics of it is unclear.”
Stand-up comedian Sorabh Pant, who is often known to speak up about fire safety during Diwali, says that while the ban on any type of firecracker is welcome, a more universal system is needed. “If one were to look at the neighbourhoods during Diwali, there’s always someone’s house that’s had a fire. And still people burst crackers each year regardless of all of this. Now, fourteen people have been killed due to a lack in fire safety measures, and that’s no joke. While I’m all for banning anything that will mitigate fire hazards, I don’t really see a point in a temporary ban till the 22nd,” he says.
India, as a country, seems incapable of learning from its tragedies. When enough time passes, people always move on to the next issue. To further elaborate this point, Shiv takes the instance of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. “When the tragedy occurred in Bhopal, people outraged, but that was the end of it. Safety equipment should have been distributed across the country to ensure that a similar tragedy would not occur again. As soon as a crisis is over, we forget the crisis,” he states.
Sorabh believes that it is beyond time that a more comprehensive plan was drawn up for the city. “The problem with us is that we either do nothing or we go to the other extreme. What needs to be done instead is for the government to simply lay down a comprehensive set of rules and just say that we all have to stick to it,” he shrugs.
Shiv, however, doesn’t believe that it will be so simple, with the current atmosphere and delays in policy making. He emphatically states, “We don’t put what we learned from the crisis into the everyday functioning of our institutions. We don’t value human life and we have no long term plan of action in place at the back of a tragedy. If we did, a lot of people would not have died.”
