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India miserably fails the fire safety test. Tragedies have piled up over the years. Enforcement hasn’t moved

On Wednesday, all eyes were on a Delhi hotel fire that left 21 dead, 18 of them foreigners. A day later, the ICU of a hospital in Muzaffarpur, Bihar was ablaze. By afternoon, five deaths had been confirmed. We are pained, but not shocked, because, over the years, we have witnessed too many of these horrors. Fire and related casualties have simply become part of our everyday lives. Ten years ago, one of every five fire-related deaths, globally, used to happen in India. There’s no reason to hope things are better now. In fact, before Wednesday’s hotel tragedy, fires in Delhi had already claimed 45 lives this year – 15 in March, 13 in May. If that’s the state of the capital, how bad might things be elsewhere?

This is not a rhetorical question. In 2023, WHO said more than 1mn Indians are “moderately or severely” burnt each year. And the reason isn’t geography. We aren’t so fire-prone because of some natural disadvantage. Our complete disregard for rules and safety is a predisposing factor. Otherwise, the Dabwali fire of 1995 should have been the mother of all lessons. It was a school’s prize distribution function. The enclosure was made of cloth. It was packed way beyond capacity, and one of its two exits was closed for VIPs. Result: 446 people died when the enclosure caught fire.

That should have rewritten every safety manual in the country. But no, Delhi’s Flourish Stay B&B, the one that was gutted on Wednesday, had only one exit. In 2019’s Anaj Mandi fire, also in Delhi, 45 workers died because one of the two staircases in the building was blocked with combustible goods. That same year, 22 students died in Surat’s Takshashila Arcade, because their makeshift fourth-floor coaching centre was a tinderbox, with plastic walls and ceiling, and no escape route. Be it Uphaar Cinema, 1997, or Kolkata’s AMRI Hospital, 2011, fires turned fatal whenever they were nursed by stupidity and greed.

How is it possible that a B&B with permission for six rooms, operates 25? If the authorities, whose job is to make safety checks, have eyes only for cheques, fires in factories, hotels, hospitals, markets, won’t stop. And when they occur, our deficient firefighting infra – 97.5% shortage of fire stations, and 96.3% of personnel, according to NDMA – won’t help. We know we’ll be pained again, but not shocked.