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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.

When the Clouds Call the Bluff

Mumbai’s annual monsoon ordeal has become a test of whether governance can keep pace with a changing climate.

Few cities romanticise the monsoon as much as Mumbai. The first showers arrive with nostalgia and Bollywood melodies. Soon enough, however, romance gives way to ritual: flooded roads, submerged railway tracks, fallen trees, gridlocked traffic and stranded commuters.


Governance Audit

This year, the examination has been particularly unforgiving. Between late June and the first week of July, the city recorded some of its heaviest rainfall in recent memory. The Santacruz observatory crossed the 1,000 mm mark within days, while Colaba received nearly 883 mm over the same period. Meteorologists have described the spell as extraordinary, attributing it to the increasingly erratic weather patterns associated with climate change.


But rainfall statistics alone do not determine whether a city succeeds or fails. What matters is whether its infrastructure was designed and its institutions prepared to cope with precisely such extremes.


For Mumbaikars, the true barometer has never been the rain gauge. It has always been the suburban railway.


The sequence has long been familiar. Moderate flooding usually disrupts the Harbour Line first. Heavier rain slows the Central Railway. The Western Railway, traditionally the most resilient corridor, tends to hold out longest. This year, however, even the Western line faltered far earlier than expected, illustrating just how unusual the rainfall had become.


The consequences were immediate. Thousands of commuters remained stranded for hours as tracks submerged, roads became impassable and buses crawled through waist-deep water. Across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, vehicles lay half-submerged while office-goers walked kilometres through flooded streets simply to reach home. Similar scenes unfolded in Pune, Nashik and several other parts of Maharashtra, underscoring that the challenge extended well beyond the financial capital.


Predictably, attention turned towards the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, India’s wealthiest municipal body, whose annual budget exceeds that of several Indian states. Citizens were entitled to ask an uncomfortable question: after decades of investment in storm-water drains, pumping stations and road improvements, why does the city continue to resemble a shallow lake after every episode of intense rainfall?


Familiar Defence

Municipal officials offered a familiar defence: rainfall exceeded design assumptions, high tides impeded drainage and strong winds felled hundreds of trees.


These explanations are technically sound. But they also reveal the problem. Infrastructure built for yesterday’s climate cannot be expected to perform adequately in tomorrow’s.


Climate resilience no longer means designing for average monsoon conditions. It means preparing for increasingly frequent extremes.


That reality has inevitably entered the political arena. During the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly’s monsoon session, the annual exchange of accusations began almost as quickly as the rains themselves.


Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis argued that the rainfall represented an extraordinary natural event which had tested infrastructure across several parts of India, not merely Maharashtra. Referring to the newly inaugurated Missing Link project on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, he maintained that authorities restored traffic within roughly 18 hours after continuous efforts following a landslide near Tunnel-2. He also cautioned against allowing political criticism to undermine confidence in Maharashtra’s engineering capabilities.


The Missing Link has nevertheless become an emblem of the broader debate. Barely weeks after its inauguration, a landslide triggered by heavy rainfall temporarily disrupted one of the state’s flagship infrastructure projects. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation described the incident as an “act of God”, emphasising that the tunnel itself remained structurally safe and that exceptional rainfall had triggered the slope failure.


The Opposition was unconvinced. Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar faction) argued that projects involving public investments worth thousands of crores should survive their very first monsoon without requiring emergency interventions. Their criticism reflected a wider public expectation that modern infrastructure should anticipate predictable climatic risks rather than merely react to them.


Reducing the entire debate to political blame would be intellectually lazy.


Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that Indian cities are experiencing a fundamental shift in rainfall patterns. Monsoons are becoming shorter, but individual rainfall events are growing significantly more intense. Urbanisation has covered natural absorption zones with concrete. Wetlands have disappeared. Rivers and natural drains have narrowed under decades of encroachment.


No municipal corporation, however wealthy, can entirely eliminate flooding under such conditions. Equally, no government can hide indefinitely behind the argument that every extreme event is unprecedented.


The real question is whether public policy is evolving as quickly as the climate.


There are encouraging signs. Maharashtra has announced an ambitious Rs. 13,000-crore Integrated Flood Mitigation Master Plan intended to transform Mumbai into a “Sponge City”. Rather than relying solely upon larger drains and additional pumping stations, the proposal combines engineering with nature-based solutions—rainwater absorption zones, improved water retention, enhanced pumping infrastructure and climate-resilient urban planning.


If executed competently, it could represent the most significant rethink of Mumbai’s flood management strategy in decades.


But engineering alone will not restore public confidence.


Citizens judge governance less by master plans than by everyday experience. They expect drains to be desilted before the rains arrive, trees to be scientifically managed rather than reactively trimmed, civic agencies to coordinate seamlessly during emergencies, weather warnings to be timely and accurate, and accountability to be visible when systems fail. These are not extravagant demands. They are the minimum expectations of a global financial capital.


The annual ritual of political point-scoring serves little purpose. Governments must candidly acknowledge operational shortcomings wherever they exist. Opposition parties, meanwhile, should contribute policy alternatives rather than merely amplifying public anger. As climate change accelerates, cooperative governance will prove considerably more valuable than partisan theatrics.


Mumbai has always possessed an extraordinary capacity to recover. After every flood, trains resume, offices reopen and life returns with remarkable speed. That resilience has rightly become part of the city’s mythology.


But resilience is not the same as good governance. The willingness of citizens to endure hardship should never become an excuse for institutions to tolerate avoidable failures.


(The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

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