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23 August 2024 at 9:59:04 pm

Civic Lines

The Eiffel Tower is an unlikely place for a quarrel about religion, gender and multiculturalism. Yet, a private visit by a BAPS delegation has managed to turn one of France’s most recognisable symbols into the setting for one. The controversy deserves neither the reflexive defensiveness of some Indian commentators nor the temptation to turn the conduct of one religious organisation into a verdict on India. During the visit this week by around 100 people associated with BAPS, Eiffel Tower...

Civic Lines

The Eiffel Tower is an unlikely place for a quarrel about religion, gender and multiculturalism. Yet, a private visit by a BAPS delegation has managed to turn one of France’s most recognisable symbols into the setting for one. The controversy deserves neither the reflexive defensiveness of some Indian commentators nor the temptation to turn the conduct of one religious organisation into a verdict on India. During the visit this week by around 100 people associated with BAPS, Eiffel Tower employees claimed their female colleagues were asked to leave their posts or limit their presence as the delegation passed. The tower’s operating company, SETE, subsequently acknowledged that the delegation had requested arrangements limiting interactions with women and admitted that such conditions should not have been accepted. Staff protests then forced the landmark to close temporarily. BAPS, while expressing regret for the distress caused, has said nobody was denied access to the tower. If a religious delegation asks a public institution to remove or conceal female employees because they are women, the request is plainly at odds with the egalitarian principles governing public life in France. BAPS, as an organisation operating in France, has a responsibility to understand that its religious practices cannot automatically be transplanted into every public setting. Private religious observance is one thing; asking a public institution to rearrange its workforce along gender lines is quite another. But the Eiffel Tower management deserves at least as much scrutiny. SETE had the authority to say no. Instead, it accommodated a request that it now concedes should never have been accepted. The subsequent strike was therefore not simply a protest against an awkward religious request. It was also a rebuke to an institution that failed to uphold its own rules and values. This is where the larger argument about multiculturalism becomes relevant. A confident pluralist society does not require every cultural or religious preference to be accommodated. It requires minorities to enjoy freedom of belief while accepting the common civic rules that govern everyone else. At the same time, it would be equally foolish to inflate one extraordinary incident into a judgement on BAPS, Hinduism or India. BAPS operates across several continents, and its women participate in the organisation’s activities, including its international women’s conferences. One controversial request during a half-hour visit cannot erase that broader record any more than the misconduct of a Christian organisation abroad would automatically become a failing of Italy or the Vatican. The Ministry of External Affairs is right to treat the matter as one between the organisations concerned rather than as a diplomatic embarrassment requiring governmental intervention. BAPS France should acknowledge more forthrightly why the request was unacceptable and work to repair the trust it has damaged. The Eiffel Tower management, meanwhile, should explain why it agreed to it in the first place. A pluralist society works only when the boundaries of tolerance apply to institutions as much as to visitors.

A Notice Is Not a Wall

Writer: Sagari Gupta
Sagari Gupta
1 day ago
4 min read

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings.

The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the collapse remains unconfirmed, what is already clear is the lethal cost of allowing buildings to be altered, crowded and repaired without adequate regard for structural safety.


Building-collapse investigations generally look at structural weakness, unapproved floor additions, removed load-bearing walls and overloading. Those are engineering questions. The policy question that sits above them is the gap between output and outcome.


Delhi’s municipal system, like most regulatory systems in India, has been built to measure and reward the first. It has almost no mechanism for verifying the second.


The person who decides to add a floor or convert a house into a PG is rarely the person inside it when the structure fails. That mismatch between who takes the risk and who bears its consequence is a textbook negative externality, and it is why market incentives alone will not fix unsafe construction. Land is expensive, formal housing is out of reach for most young workers and students, and demand for cheap paying-guest accommodation near college campuses stays high year-round. A house becomes a PG. A floor built for one household starts carrying three. The extra income is immediate. The structural cost, if it arrives, arrives later and lands on someone else, split between tenant, neighbour and municipality.


Death Traps

Structural collapses killed 8,756 people across India between 2018 and 2022, close to five deaths a day, a figure that surfaced in Rajya Sabha proceedings drawing on National Crime Records Bureau data. That is not a data gap. India has building bye-laws, approval procedures and municipal enforcement powers already on the books. What it lacks is an implementation architecture that closes the loop between identifying risk and removing it.


Put simply, a notice proves the state has produced an output. It does not prove a structural assessment was completed, that residents were evacuated, that repairs happened, or that a certified engineer signed off. It proves paperwork exists, nothing more.


Closing that gap is a design problem, not a resourcing one. Every high-risk building should carry a case number and a named officer accountable for it, with fixed deadlines at each stage: inspection within a set number of days, a structural assessment where required, a decision on repair, evacuation, sealing or demolition, and verification of compliance before closure. The named officer should change with the stage, so responsibility cannot sit with nobody in particular. An overdue inspection should automatically flag the officer holding it. An order left unimplemented past deadline should escalate on its own, with the reason for delay logged, whether that is litigation, an uncooperative owner, a capacity shortfall or an evacuation still pending. This turns an enforcement record into an audit trail.


That record should sit in public view, within legitimate privacy limits. A ward-level dashboard showing how many high-risk properties are under inspection, how many have completed structural assessments and how many remain unresolved gives a councillor, a tenant or a journalist a way to verify whether a case is moving, rather than take an official’s word for it.


At present, issuing a notice ends an official’s obligation. Under an outcome-based system, an unresolved case stays attached to the administration until the risk is addressed, realigning the incentive from documentation to resolution.


The same logic applies to unauthorised construction. A booking is not enforcement. A demolition order is not a demolition. A sealing order is not closure if the property reopens later. The administrative chain should end only once the physical condition of the property has been independently verified, not when a file is marked complete.


There is also a straightforward fiscal argument. The Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund pays a standard ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh for every death in a building collapse - a rate applied most recently after the Thane collapse this July. Apply that rate to the death toll in the Satya Niketan case and the ex-gratia payout alone crosses Rs. 12 lakh, before emergency response, hospital treatment, policing, lost working days and litigation are counted.


Prevention requires spending before anything visible has gone wrong, which makes it a harder budget line to defend than a rescue operation. That asymmetry, not a lack of resources, is why prevention keeps losing inside the state.


The Satya Niketan building had an owner. It had tenants, students renting rooms inside it. Someone should have flagged it for scrutiny before repair work began on a Sunday afternoon. A notice is evidence that the state has seen a risk. It is not evidence the risk has been removed. Only a verified outcome closes that gap, and until the system is built to track outcomes rather than paperwork, the next notice will tell us as little as this one did.


(The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

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