The script is familiar. Days after a horrific fire that takes lives, there is outrage all around; the concerned government pretends to be shocked and institutes an enquiry; arrests are made; reports are called for; and the tragedy is forgotten till another horrific inferno breaks out in another place. There is no reason to expect that the script will be different in the fire that occurred in Goa last week, in a nightclub of a popular and fast-growing hospitality chain owned by brothers living in Delhi, in which 25 lives were lost in a matter of seconds. At least 20 of them were the staff of the nightclub, many of them in the kitchen, trapped and charred or asphyxiated; four or five were tourists. A tragedy waiting to happen.
The cause of the fire matters not a whit to the families of the dead or the injured, just as the compensation announced has little meaning. What matters is that the nightclub, in the backwaters of Arpora, reportedly did not have the requisite permissions but had a temporary construction of palm leaves, which hastened the spread of the blaze, and violated norms, including construction in a Coastal Regulation Zone area, had narrow entrances and exits such that fire brigade vehicles could not access the venue and had to be parked 400 metres away. The sarpanch of Arpora was on record that demolition notices served on the nightclub by the local administration had been stayed at higher levels. All this points to the blinding truth: human lives are placed secondary, if at all, when it comes to safety norms and adherence to safety standards.
Similar tragedies occurred in a hip rooftop restaurant in Mumbai in December 2017, where too safety norms had been violated; in the Rajkot gaming zone fire last year; in hospitals across the country, claiming lives even of infants and the ailing; and in apartment complexes and slums alike—the redeveloped slum colonies in Mumbai do not have fire exits—the list is endless. The stark fact that stands out through these years and incidents is that fire safety norms, such as they exist in a deficient manner across municipalities and local administrations, are wilfully ignored in the pursuit of profit or exhibitionism. The buck stops with both developers as well as administrations; if the latter came down heavily for violating fire safety norms, developers and owners would have to fall in line, but the two connive at the expense of unsuspecting people. The nightclub fire dents, once more, Goa’s image as a cool destination, but that is secondary. It is important to take the right lessons from this tragedy in the state and elsewhere too, make course corrections in enforcing safety norms, and assiduously follow the law in permitting constructions. People’s lives cannot be at stake.
