Regulated Neglect

The Goa nightclub tragedy where 25 people were burnt alive was the predictable outcome of ignored safety norms, lax inspections, compromised access and a governance system that reacts only after bodies are counted. In a tourism capital that markets excess as lifestyle, death has now joined the itinerary.

The Goa tragedy joins a long roll-call of preventable Indian catastrophes, ranging from bridge collapses and train derailments to hospital fires and flooded coaching centres. While the political class has expressed grief and condolences, the public debate, too, has followed a depressing script following the fire. There has been talk of missing fire extinguishers, faulty wiring, overcrowding, blocked exits and poor management. Yet, this technocratic post-mortem carefully avoids the central fact that this was not an accident, but a governance failure. What failed was enforcement of regulations and behind that failure sits a culture that treats safety as a nuisance and compliance as ‘optional.’

The club’s remote backwater location, reachable only by a narrow approach road, forced fire engines to halt nearly 400 metres away. Precious minutes were lost manoeuvring hoses and personnel through terrain never designed for emergency response. A nightclub built for crowds, profits and spectacle was regrettably never built for escape.

Goa, the country’s premier tourism state, has long marketed itself as India’s answer to Ibiza with its beaches, drinks, neon lights and permissiveness. But beneath the postcard image lies a darker ledger of crime in beach shacks, money laundering through casinos, drug deaths, taxi mafias and now mass death in a nightclub. Each scandal is treated as an aberration. This is what happens when a public economy built on tourism is left to the private logic of greed and the political logic of indifference.

Tourism in Goa does not need more marketing campaigns or nightlife festivals. It needs rules that bite. and zoning laws that matter. It needs safety audits that are real and evacuation protocols rehearsed as drills rather than imagined in hindsight. It needs a government willing to antagonise powerful interests rather than mourn their victims later.

The families of the dead will receive compensation. Some officials may even face temporary suspension. A few low-level arrests will signal resolve. But the deeper ecosystem of the unholy alliance of lax regulators, bribable inspectors, political patrons and profit-hungry businesses will remain intact. That is the real firetrap. It is this ecosystem that neutralises outrage, absorbs scandal and ensures that accountability evaporates before it reaches the powerful.

In Goa, as in the rest of India, tragedy has become procedural. Immediately after the incident comes the horror, then the condolences and then compensation followed by an inquiry whose conclusions will politely indict ‘systems’ rather than names. But tourism will rebound, crowds will return, and the music will resume. Only the lesson will be lost. And when the next inferno breaks out the state will once again act surprised by a disaster it spent years painstakingly preparing.