“Safety is when a child
sleeps in the back seat of a car with his parents at the wheels.”
After a full day of fun at
the beach, a tired child chooses to sleep without worrying a bit about the
risks involved in their return journey. He doesn’t think of the risks from the
faulty design of the road bend, a missing road sign or a guard rail, the mechanical
defects in the car, a tired father who might doze off while driving, and risks
from other irresponsible drunk drivers on the road.
The child under the
protective care of his parents from his birth instinctively chooses to trust
their intent, and sincerity towards him and decides to trust them and their
decisions for his life.
This quote above was not
told by any child but by an adult with substantial lived experience.
He said this profound but
seemingly innocuous line after realising how peacefully we live when we are
made to believe that our safety is in the hands of the people who are
well-intentioned, sincere and responsible for our wellbeing.
And he chose this
child-parent situation to best describe it.
Are we different from a
child when we trust the state?
When we board a train, just
after finding our berths, we start setting up our beds for a comfortable and
peaceful journey ahead. Do we even once think of the accidents in the recent
past caused by defective coaches, poor maintenance of the rail infrastructure,
cracked tracks, negligent drunk drivers, careless signal men, sabotage, and any
such risk this train might face one of them? The same goes for us with the
airlines, the mechanic at the garage we get our car serviced, the shopping mall
we visit, the cinema hall we go to and the traffic police when he signals us to
cross the intersections. We think that there are responsible people who would
have sincerely done their jobs.
We perhaps have to trust to
live normally. We don’t have a choice here.
The state like our parents
has somehow managed to give us that sense of safety with its exaggerated
intention for our well-being and the efficiency of its various arms of
execution in the shapes of regulators, administrators and the judiciary to tell
us that our life and well-being is in safe hands. The moot points here are,
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How well-intentioned are these arms and how efficient are they?
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What are the internal quality checks to evaluate their performance and what are
the safeguards to ensure that they are not just responsible but are also
accountable to the law?
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What happens to the people who become victims of their neglect?
Let us take the case of the
Old Rajinder Nagar, New Delhi incident as an example.
One coaching centre like
many in that locality was operating its library in the basement of a building.
Heavy rain in that area caused a flood-like situation, water entered the
basement of one where some 20 civil service aspirants were preparing for their
examinations, and the gushing water caused a short circuit in the biometric
access control system thus trapping them underwater. 17 students could be
rescued and 3 lost their lives. The driver of the SUV who sped through the
water which caused a wave that disrupted the electronics was arrested. The
matter would have died like any other had the characters been of a lower class.
The Rajinder Nager incident
has stirred the collective emotions of people from every corner of the country.
Many of us are distraught because the victims are of our socio-economic class
who were fighting battles similar to ours. The pictures of those three young
talented kinds are getting us closest to the pain as parents. The media reports
of similar incidents happening in villages or in slums which usually lose steam
after a day. Life gets back to normalcy and another incident takes its place in
the pages of the newspapers. It turns into a nameless statistic and gets added
to the list of unnatural deaths in the national portal under a certain
category. Only researchers use them for analysis. No one learns any lesson from
it.
While this article is being
written, the MCD has responded by sealing some coaching centres operating at
the basements, earthmoving equipment is mobilized to excavate now buried storm
water drains which were in use for some years perhaps when the colony was
established and people from their drawing rooms are deciding who to be made
accountable, and the stakeholders in that community, the inspectors of the
regulators and the policymakers are feigning innocence as if they do not know
who is behind it and how it happened. Everyone knows how it happened, and
everyone is waiting for this to pass. The best part is that these interventions
are happening only at Old Rajender Nagar, not the whole of Delhi, not even New
Rajinder Nagar.
Is such an incident
happening for the first time?
The outbreak of fire is a
common phenomenon in hospitals, and schools across the country, from newborns
in incubators to patients in life support in an ICU die due to a small neglect
by an electrician which has escaped internal quality checks and external
audits. Train accidents happen in disturbing regularity and only incidents like
what happened in Bahanaga make us question the internal workings of the system.
But there are well-oiled systems in place on how to deal with it.
We are turning passive and
philosophical to such deaths.
The less said about our
attitude towards personal safety and others' safety the better. It can be
nightmarish to the ones who are not born here. The confidence with which a
bike-riding father with two kids takes the wrong side of the road braving all
the oncoming traffic to drop his kids at the school before the school gate
closes will remind you of the brave student who stood facing the barrel of a
tank in Tiananmen Square, Beijing 1989. The government also accepts that a
country of 1.44 billion people can always afford to lose a few million of them
every year to unnatural deaths.
Questioning voices rise
when some high net-worth lives are lost but then the state has the ultimate
weapon to gag such voices – money.
Unlimited money can be
granted under the glare of the media to the near and dear ones of the ones who
lose their lives and limbs earning political brownie points. These instruments
of gags are called by the name solatium or ex gratia awards. It works well to
gag the whiners and wailers when the people are in a situation with no other
option.
It does precious little to
change those rusty cogs in the system that caused such a mishap and stands to
do so in future.
Behind the image of
paternal benevolence for which we trust the state for our safety and protection
of human rights, we don’t see how generationally and tactfully they have kept
themselves and their array of machinery starting from the regulators, administrators,
inspectors and enforcers away from any accountability. The size of the
establishment is so big, and the duration of their indemnification from any
accountability, it now seems impossible to bring any change that can change the
status quo.
The state is infamous for
appropriating a cause by formulating a policy.
That leaves the nay-sayers
with no evidence to blame the state of neglect or not for having the right
intent. They do it not because they are serious about it. They do it because it
is politically not wise not to stand with the cause. Call it political expediency.
Our constitution has
established a system that insulates the government and its various arms from
the adjudicating power of the judiciary about matters concerning neglect. By
not giving enough teeth to the people and the laws to establish negligence and hold
someone accountable.
When incidents like this
happen the cause of it is internally investigated and what happens to the
findings is kept under the wraps of the red tape. When the incident is too big
to be handled internally, a judiciary enquiry is commissioned headed by a chosen
person where the state is under no obligation to accept the recommendations. In
our living memory, no penalty bigger than the suspension of a lower-level
functionary for a few months has been awarded to anyone. We also have not
witnessed any change in the system to enforce responsibility for deliverables
linked to quality and time and to make anyone accountable.
The array of instruments of
dilution at their disposal is mindboggling.
Having declared a policy,
they can dilly dally on formulating the right laws, they may pass a law and not
the rules, but they can weaken it by not giving adequate power and financial
resources needed for implementation. They can weaken the regulatory bodies by
not appointing any head for a period or by appointing someone who will not be an
irritant with his hyper activism or appointing a pliable one who will stay
dormant or of a particular ‘Bichardhara’ who will participate in establishing a
hidden cultural agenda across the organization.
If someone asked you who is
the government?
The best answer can be this
– It’s a body formed by people from amongst us who can tax you at will and
punish you for any deviation and assume responsibility for everything but if something
goes wrong or questioned, can say that they are accountable for nothing.
Will this Old Rajinder
Nagar incident be the last or there will be many more in future?
The answer is obvious.
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