The industrial accident in Tamil Nadu on Sunday (June 21) and the fire at a three-storey building in Lucknow on Monday (June 22) — both bring home the need for an urgent and total overhaul of safety mechanisms at work and living spaces countrywide.
The fatal incident at a seafood export factory in Tiruvallur district of Tamil Nadu occurred due to an ammonia gas leak in a refrigeration facility. Nine workers, all women, died of exposure to toxic fumes. Initial reports have pinpointed a woeful failure of the plant's safety infrastructure, including something as basic as the automatic emergency alarm that did not go off. Other contributing factors highlighted include worker housing right next to hazardous chemical pipelines, dodgy safety audits, and a lack of follow-up action beyond monitoring.
In the Lucknow tragedy, 15 young men and women were killed in a fire at a commercial building housing an air-conditioned coaching centre. Lacking an outlet, smoke filled the interiors and asphyxiated the trapped students. The building had only one exit and no firefighting equipment. Beyond these immediate causes, there were violations of zoning laws, negligent management, and a lack of implementation vigour. Again, we hear that the civic regulators served notice but went no further.
Whether they are industrial disasters, fires at apartments and commercial establishments, bridge collapses, or stampedes, such fatal incidents are normally labelled as accidents, but the recurring pattern of compliance and implementation failure behind each of them qualifies them to be called man-made disasters. When such shortcomings are common, frequent and recurrent across events, locations and safety regimes, we must recognise the problem for what it is. The safety codes are there, nicely laid out in colourful websites. It’s just that accountability is out to lunch.
The conclusion from India’s many recent tragedies is that the safety model in vogue — government inspects, management neglects — is failing us repeatedly. To make it work, we need to involve a third stakeholder who, in fact, has the most to lose in the equation, the public. Our protocols must expand the say people have on safety and use their omnipresence to perform the watchdog function. This would involve revising all safety manuals to include a role for people, bystanders, consumers and citizens as whistleblowers. This will break open the cosy space that regulators and managements currently enjoy, having all to themselves.
Within this approach, every commercial establishment should be legally required to display a QR code through which a bystander or shopper can upload photos of hazards such as fire-trap passages, missing extinguishers, uninsulated wiring, and overcrowded spaces. It must be mandatory for civic agencies to respond to such alerts and make public the action taken, with full disclosure of data. Every coaching centre, school, mall, cinema, hospital and commercial building should be made to prominently display at its entrance the status of its last fire audit, again disclosing all data.
Additionally, each civic agency must maintain a public database that allows citizens to rate the safety standards of establishments in their purview. Every business must be mandated to display its public rating on all its commercial material, including advertising, websites and shopfronts.
Crowdsourcing of safety has become a necessary imperative because all else has failed, repeatedly. Why not? Businesses love to tom-tom the five-star ratings of their wares. Why not their fire extinguishers too?