Every rule relating to safety in general, and fire hazards in particular, appears to have been broken by the owners & those who ran it
There is something overwhelmingly sad about the fire at South Kolkata’s AMRI Hospital, which took around 90 lives in the early hours of Friday. All deaths were caused by smoke suffocation. Nearly everyone who died was an indoor patient. Perhaps there hasn’t been a fumigation of live patients on this scale anywhere in the world. That imbues the incident with macabre drama, almost guaranteeing that future writers and filmmakers would use it as plot.
The hospital was meant to be a “state-of-the-art” affair. It was privately owned and privately run, and not a decrepit, typically government-run facility, housed in a crumbling building ready to go down with the smallest accident. In short, it was meant to be efficiently maintained, with the paying customer in view, and the reputation of the company which owned it in mind. And yet every rule relating to safety in general, and fire hazards in particular, appears to have been broken by the owners and those who ran it, very clearly in quest of commercial gain, and in flagrant disregard of concern for patients who must have paid handsomely to be at such an expensive facility.
This incident occurred in Kolkata, but it could have been anywhere in India, for such has been the pathway etched by post-colonial capitalism in the country with its emphasis on the culture of taking shortcuts for quick bucks since all concerned have probably been paid off and all concerned are likely to be on the take. (Perhaps the only aspect peculiarly Kolkata here is the rush of anxious neighbours from the nearby slums to douse the fire when the hospital staff, including senior personnel, appear to have fled the scene.)
If the Friday tragedy is a motif for India, then all principal institutions in every town and city in the country, whether run by public or private bodies, need to be subject to a mandatory check within a stipulated period for compliance of safety norms so that customers and consumers are not placed at risk. Incidents like AMRI, Stephen Court (also in Kolkata, two years ago) and Uphaar Cinema (New Delhi) must truly be rendered a thing of the past. It appears key institutions in the nation’s capital, such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, to which thousands of patients flock from all over South Asia, have no anti-fire certification. Since Parliament is in session, a resolution to this effect can be obtained through a call attention motion on a priority basis.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has taken a few necessary steps in terms of arrests and licence cancellation. But can she absolve herself as the state’s health minister? AMRI had been officially warned, but did little to set things right.
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