India’s Master Plan - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 6

invoiced prices, and then bribe them again to let you do the repairs, again with substand-
ard materials charged at overinvoiced prices? The same disregard applies to hygiene. This
was demonstrated tragically in July 2013 when 27 children died after eating food - pos-
sibly contaminated by insecticide - provided by a government midday meal scheme at their
primary school in Bihar.
It often seems that life in India is not valued highly. Public services are allowed to decay,
and there is scant concern for public safety. The narrow streets of areas such as old Delhi,
mostly inaccessible in an emergency, are full of overcrowded, unlawfully extended build-
ings of poor quality construction, strewn with jumbles of low-hanging electrical wires and
potentially dangerous equipment. Mumbai's chief fire officer said in March 2013 that, out
of 1,857 buildings inspected for fire safety facilities, only 237 - just 13 per cent - fully
complied. The service had issued notices to over 1,000 buildings for not following fire
safety norms, and there were over 5,000 high-rise buildings yet to be inspected. 10
In Kolkata, at least 20 people were killed in February 2013 in a market fire, while 93 had
died in a hospital fire 14 months earlier and there were 45 deaths in a fire in a block of flats
in March 2010. Some of the people responsible were arrested, including businessmen who
owned the hospital, but that was primarily a political gesture by the state government to ap-
pease public criticism and nothing basic was done to improve fire services and clear unsafe
buildings. It was reported in Delhi in April 2013 that there were only ten inspectors for the
city's 30,000 licensed lifts, none of which had ever lost their licences. 11 This is, of course,
not just an Indian problem. One of the most tragic results of faulty construction and irrel-
evant safety regulations was reported from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in April 2013
when an eight-storey factory building collapsed, causing the deaths of over 1,100 people
who had been working in appalling conditions. Over the previous decade, more than 700
textile and apparel industry workers had died in fires and building disasters. 12
Such problems are just too enormous to be tackled in the foreseeable future, and the
basic attitudes pose greater risks as the economy grows with new technologies. In the light
of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in March 2011, one wonders if India
can be relied on to ensure sustained safety standards if it goes ahead with its planned series
of nuclear power plants. 13 Union Carbide's pesticide plant disaster in the city of Bhopal
in 1984 was basically caused by a disregard for safety and management procedures, as I
discovered on a series of visits at the time. The Indian management had ignored a warning
issued two years earlier by experts from the US parent company about 'the adequacy of the
tank relief valve to relieve a runaway reaction'. 14 That led to the death of over 5,000 people
and continued ill health of over 500,000 in one of the world's worst industrial calamities.
Nearly 30 years later, the 70-acre site has still not been cleared and cleaned up, and the
ground is contaminated with dangerous chemicals at over 500 times the Indian standard
levels. 15 Gaunt rusting steel structures and dilapidated factory buildings stand as a grim re-