While administration in Delhi and several other cities across India are busy sealing coaching institutes for not adhering to the laid down rules and norms and running classes and libraries in the basements came the photograph of water leaking from the newly constructed parliament building. This June another photo went viral — it was of under-constructed Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
Although the Opposition parties and even common folk are questioning the quality of construction materials used in these two structures, what many people are not asking is whether government buildings, schools, hospitals etc all over India are really following all these safety rules and regulations?
Besides, is is not a fact that there are lakhs of marketing complexes, restaurants, community centres, offices of media-houses, private homes, and even government constructed structures situated in basements? Not only that, many reputed hotels have underground kitchens. Will all these be sealed or even bulldozed as they are more hazardous than the coaching institutes where the water gushed in rather unexpectedly.
Climate change a favourite whipping boy
Nobody is questioning actions against those violating rules but in the name of crackdown the government should not use it to distract attention from the main issue of sudden flooding of the coaching hub of Delhi.
With the help of patronising media, it has become a habit of sort to blame nature, or climate change for all the mismanagement caused by the government. The haphazard and rampant construction in the urban centres and highlands of Himalaya and South India in the name of attracting tourists are wreaking havoc every year, yet we are on a construction spree. The sad fact is that now we are losing more than earning through tourism as man-made disasters are taking a heavy toll of lives and materials.
Nobody is lending ears to the repeated warning by the environmentalists and geologists. As a knee-jerk reaction some measures would be taken—as this time against coaching institutes and the car driver in Delhi. Instead of developing new drainage system and desilting the existing one in the cities we are building huge mansions, flyovers, underground subways etc. Heavy rain during the G-20 Summit in Delhi (September 9-10 last year) the newly built Bharat Mandapam also witnessed waterlogging.
If building basement — otherwise a symbol of ‘development’ — is really a crime, why just target coaching institutes. Before anything more tragic happens, we should immediately ban all underground construction.
After all, the underground Palika Bazar which has around 380 shops was built by the New Delhi Municipal Corporation way back in 1970s. It was a prize attraction then as it was situated in the heart of Delhi.
It has earned a bad name when a female shopper was raped by two shopkeepers in 2007 and police issued a warning that woman should not visit this market alone. Yet, according to an estimate it has 15,000 people any time in the day, including tourists, both domestic and foreign.
As waterlogging in the nearby Ajmeri Gate (Minto Road) has become a regular phenomenon, and in future nothing can be ruled out, has the NDMC made any plan to counter this impending danger?
Fire safety measures
Why just talk about flooding? How many government offices and court rooms throughout the length and breadth of the country follow the fire safety measures or have fire extinguishers been installed there? They are all public places jam-packed with people and have very congested passage to come out.
What about dilapidated government school buildings and hospitals, though in the recent years some improvement has been made. Yet so far fire safety measures are concerned there is no such provision anywhere.
Official apathy
I am witness to one such gross violation of the fire safety norms by a district magistrate. This incident is a bit old, (of 1988) but hardly anything has changed at the grassroots level since then.
When there used to be serious crisis of LPG cylinders throughout the country customers had to wait for weeks to get it. They were asked to take their own cylinder from the LPG dealer’s godown, though as per the rules this should not be allowed. Newspapers, which were the only independent sources of reporting then would often highlight the issue. Though this process of publicly distributing cylinders to hundreds of customers and that too without any fire safety measures or fire-tenders around was not at all permissible.
As a young staff correspondent of The Times of India posted in the historic city of Gaya in Bihar I often used to visit the collectorate to meet the district magistrate or other officials. Those were the heydays of Naxal movement in the entire Central Bihar.
Once when I went to meet the DM, his personal secretary told me to wait in his ante-chamber as Saheb was busy. After waiting for a few minutes, I told him that I want to go to wash-room for urinal. This wash-room of the DM was situated just beside the chair of his secretary. The moment I entered the spacious but unventilated wash room I was surprised to find a LPG cylinder kept in the corner. Those were not days of mobile phones nor I had a camera. Otherwise, I would have taken a snap. I quietly came out regretting that I should have had a camera.
As I had already done several stories on the connivance of local officials in the LPG distribution I did not deem it fit to ask the DM as to what was the cylinder doing in the unventilated wash-room. Perhaps, he might himself did not get it stored there. After all, the LPG dealers used to keep the all powerful DM and other top officials in good humour by regularly supplying them cylinders.
It might have been the handiwork of his personal secretary or other deputy collector rank officials who had temporarily kept the cylinder there after procuring it from the nearby dealers. The plan might have been to take it home in the evening.
The big question is: Had the DM not gone to his wash-room throughout that day? Or had he deliberately ignored it? Or was it a daily practice of keeping filled-cylinder there? I was the rare outsider to go there.
This is just one instance of gross violation of fire safety measures by top officials noticed by me during my reporting years. But there was no scope to highlight them.
There is, of course, no crisis of LPG cylinder now, but officials at the lower level are seen violating many such safety norms throughout the country.
Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.