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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.

Drenched in Excuses: How Mumbai’s Leaders Let the City Sink

Mumbai’s monsoon misery lays bare not just its drains, but the bankruptcy of its politics.

As the first monsoon showers lashed Mumbai, trains ground to a halt, roads vanished under swirling brown water, power flickered out and the political blame game began. Maharashtra’s ruling coalition, the Mahayuti (comprising of the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar-led NCP) was quick to point fingers. Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde blamed the “unexpected” early arrival of the monsoon. It was a remark drenched in absurdity. The monsoon is not a rogue intruder. It arrives every year. What is truly unexpected, and unforgivable, is the government’s perennial unpreparedness.


Mumbai recorded its wettest May in over a century - 250mm in just 13 hours. But for a city that sits at the mercy of tropical cycles and rising sea levels, the failure to anticipate and mitigate such rainfall is no less than administrative dereliction. Local train services were paralysed; more than 50 services on Central and Harbour lines were cancelled. Water seeped into the newly built Worli Metro Station. The Acharya Atre Metro station had to be shut for three days. In South Mumbai, an internal municipal analysis identified 80 new flooding hotspots, adding to the 386 already on the BMC’s monsoon watchlist.


Despite the installation of 417 dewatering pumps, many failed during peak rainfall, crippling traffic and public transit. Even mini-pumping station operators were fined for negligence—too little, too late. The basic infrastructure of Mumbai, a city of 20 million and the nation’s financial capital, remains brittle and colonial in origin. That is not the fault of the clouds.


The opposition, particularly Aaditya Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (UBT), son of former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, has seized on the Mahayuti government’s failures. He has accused the state administration and the BMC of corruption, incompetence, and a lack of political will to protect the public. “Mumbai has collapsed in the rains, and it’s only May,” he scoffed. Thackeray has also charged the BJP with delaying local BMC elections to run the municipal body via proxy from the Chief Minister’s office. His barbs - “Why this hatred for Mumbai?” - landed hard. Shinde’s only retort was to gesture at the skies.


The BJP, in turn, has tried to blame the previous Sena-led BMC administration for systemic rot. Ashish Shelar, a BJP minister, suggested that the city’s current woes were rooted in years of (undivided) Shiv Sena misrule - an accusation that sparked angry poster campaigns from the UBT camp. The result was the over-familiar spectacle of mutual recrimination with parties (both ruling and opposition) offering few concrete solutions for why it continues to do so.


The romanticism of the rains, immortalized in Bollywood melodies like ‘Rimjhim Ghire Sawan,’ stands in stark contrast to the current political climate, where leaders seem more engrossed in mudslinging than in addressing the genuine concerns of the city’s residents.


This political trench warfare serves a larger purpose. For the BJP, attacking the UBT-led Sena helps justify its partnership with Shinde’s rebel faction. For Shinde, it diverts attention from his lacklustre performance in the Urban Development and Public Works departments over the past two and a half years. But all this noise comes at the expense of real governance. While leaders posture and pander to their base, ordinary Mumbaikars slosh through fetid streets, endure hours-long commutes, and fret about disease outbreaks.


The BMC’s response to the flooding has been more bureaucratic than bold. Fines and reports are trotted out after the fact, but the core of the problem remains unaddressed. Mumbai’s outdated stormwater drainage system, parts of which date back to the British era, cannot handle the volume and velocity of modern monsoon rains. The long-delayed Brimstowad project, a proposal to overhaul the city’s drainage, remains incomplete. Piecemeal interventions like pumping stations and temporary barricades may offer momentary relief, but they are not a substitute for a structural solution.


What Mumbai needs is not more spectacle, but stewardship. It needs serious investment in climate-resilient infrastructure: revamped drainage, flood-resilient construction norms, emergency response systems, and an empowered civic administration. It also needs accountable governance through local elections, not remote control. The absence of an elected BMC, long overdue, is itself an indictment of the ruling alliance’s priorities.


There is something uniquely tragic about the contrast between the poetic nostalgia Mumbai’s monsoons evoke and the bureaucratic chaos they now reliably unleash. The city of cinema and finance, of dabbawalas and Dalal Street, of sea spray and spirit, deserves better than to be reduced to a backdrop for seasonal blame games.


The Shiv Sena (UBT) has a point when it questions the Mahayuti’s handling of the crisis. But it is not blameless either. After decades of controlling the BMC, its own legacy is part of the mess. What Mumbai needs is not political scorekeeping but a new consensus: that monsoon resilience is a civic, not partisan, priority. Otherwise, it will remain locked in this yearly theatre of failure, drowning in both water and excuses.


Ultimately, when Mumbai’s streets flood, trains stall and power snaps, it is not the monsoon that has failed. It is the men in charge.

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