top of page

By:

Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 9:59:04 pm

Fatal Negligence

Newborns dying in a fire inside a government hospital is a devastating indictment of a system that is supposed to protect its most vulnerable patients. The Amravati District Women’s Hospital tragedy, where a blaze killed three infants, joins a long list of preventable institutional failures. Thirty-nine babies were inside the three-compartment facility when the fire erupted after a ventilator in the neonatal unit caught fire. Thirty-six were eventually rescued. Parents and eyewitnesses have...

Fatal Negligence

Newborns dying in a fire inside a government hospital is a devastating indictment of a system that is supposed to protect its most vulnerable patients. The Amravati District Women’s Hospital tragedy, where a blaze killed three infants, joins a long list of preventable institutional failures. Thirty-nine babies were inside the three-compartment facility when the fire erupted after a ventilator in the neonatal unit caught fire. Thirty-six were eventually rescued. Parents and eyewitnesses have alleged that the fire alarms did not sound and the automatic sprinklers failed to activate even as the district administration has said the hospital underwent regular fire audits and had applied for this year’s audit. An audit is meaningful only if it establishes that equipment works when lives depend on it. Maharashtra has already witnessed the deadly consequences of fire-safety failures in public hospitals. In 2021, eleven Covid-19 patients died in a fire at the Ahmednagar district hospital even though a fire audit conducted months earlier had recommended a firefighting system. The Amravati tragedy demands more than the familiar ritual of a high-level inquiry, compensation and promises of “strictest action”. The announcement of ex gratia payments cannot compensate parents who have lost a child they had barely begun to know. The investigation must establish not merely what ignited the fire, but why it was allowed to become fatal. Was the ventilator properly maintained? Were electrical and medical devices routinely inspected? Did alarms function? Were sprinklers operational? Was the NICU appropriately located and equipped for evacuation? Were staff trained and drills conducted? And most importantly, who was responsible for ensuring that every safeguard worked? There is another troubling detail: the neonatal unit was reportedly housed on the third floor, rather than at ground level, and questions have arisen over whether the unit was part of the building’s original plan. The state has built an elaborate architecture of laws and child-protection standards which seldom matches the situation on ground. Whether in government hospitals, schools or anganwadis, safety has become a box to be ticked rather than a responsibility to be lived. The most vulnerable children are consequently left dependent not on systems, but on the vigilance and heroism of individual staff members. That is an appalling way to run the childcare infrastructure of one India’s most developed states. A NICU is perhaps the worst possible place for institutional complacency: its patients are immobile, medically dependent and extraordinarily vulnerable to smoke, heat and even brief disruption of life-support equipment. The government must ensure that the Amravati deaths do not become another entry in the grim ledger of hospital tragedies followed by inquiries, outrage and forgetting. The real test will be whether the state can prevent the next newborn from dying in a hospital that was supposed to save him.

Dangerous Proximity

For decades, India watched wars in the Middle East with the distant anxiety of a spectator. While oil prices would ratchet and shipping lanes would grow uneasy, the bombs, missiles and geopolitical brinkmanship always unfolded somewhere else.


That comfortable distance has vanished after a U.S. Navy submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean about 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka.


With this, America’s military strikes against Iran on February 28, in conjunction with Israel, has brought the prospect of a wider war alarmingly close to India’s shores. What Washington describes as a decisive act of strategic pre-emption increasingly resembles the reckless opening of a regional conflagration.


Nearly nine million Indians live and work across the Gulf states. Even more critically, the narrow sea lanes threading through the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea carry the lifeblood of India’s economy. Roughly two-thirds of India’s crude oil imports traverse these waters. Should hostilities escalate, the disruption would not merely rattle markets; it would reverberate through Indian homes, factories and ports with startling speed.


Yet American policymakers appear curiously indifferent to such wider consequences. Washington continues to behave as though the Middle East were a strategic chessboard upon which it alone may rearrange the pieces.


America’s interventionist impulse in the region has long promised swift victories and strategic clarity. Instead, it has produced fractured states and endless turbulence. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was meant to remake the Middle East; it instead unstitched it. Long campaigns in Afghanistan and Syria were justified as necessary stabilising missions; they left behind exhaustion, insurgencies and unresolved rivalries.


For India the implications are immediate. Freight routes through the Arabian Sea may become hazardous. Naval deployments could intensify across waters that New Delhi increasingly regards as part of its strategic backyard. At a time when India is attempting to consolidate its role as a central power in the Indo-Pacific, the sudden militarisation of its western maritime flank is an unwelcome and destabilising distraction.


The United States frequently lectures the world about preserving a rules-based international order. Yet its readiness to launch strikes that risk cascading regional escalation demonstrates how fragile those rules become when great powers choose expediency over restraint.


For years, New Delhi prided itself on a careful balancing act in West Asia by cultivating close ties with Israel while maintaining civil relations with Iran and deep economic interdependence with the Gulf monarchies. It was a posture presented as strategic autonomy, proof that India could speak to all sides while committing to none. Yet the Iranian warship incident has exposed the limits of that approach


India has little appetite for such adventures. Its priorities are open sea lanes, predictable energy markets and a Middle East that does not periodically descend into flames. Washington’s latest gamble threatens all three while puncturing India’s ‘soft diplomacy’ that it has long cultivated with all countries. 

 

 


Comments

bottom of page