Instead of the faceless and powerless Indian paying with his life, it is time our political and bureaucratic classes were made accountable 

Have we become the calamity capital of the world? So it would seem, as we lurch from one disaster to another. The death toll from these accidents keeps rising, and yet alarm bells are seldom triggered loud enough for our ‘deaf’ authorities to take timely and preventive actions.

The latest disaster to have shocked the country was the recent fire at the Birch by Romeo Lane nightclub in north Goa, which left 25 people dead. It turned out the local Arpora-Nagoa panchayat had issued a demolition notice against its illegal construction in April last year, but the Luthra brothers managed to put pressure on the Directorate of Panchayats and got it stayed. Complaints by local residents warning of this ‘unsafe structure’ that violated the norms laid out by the Goa Coastal Zone Management also went unheeded, and when the local Anjuna police station issued notices to the owners to show their licences and safety permits, the move was blocked by their seniors. A magisterial inquiry is underway to investigate and fix official responsibility for this negligence, but once again it seems to be a case of too little too late.

The NCRB data shows that India records 1.5 lakh fire incidents annually, resulting in over 27,000 deaths, whose most vulnerable victims are children. The most frightening aspect of these disasters is that 57 per cent of these deaths occur in residential settings, with most of these incidents occurring at night or in the early hours of the morning when the occupants are asleep and reaction time is slow.

Or, take the case of road accidents. The numbers are overwhelming. In 2024, India recorded approximately 4.73 lakh road accidents, resulting in around 1.70 lakh deaths. We have only one per cent of the world’s vehicles, but we account for eleven per cent of the world’s accidents, the majority of which, cops point out, are preventable. Fatality rates have risen on our high-speed highways due to increasingly reckless driving of our often drunk drivers. 

An indication of just how horrendous some of these accidents are is when this December, a Delhi couple bled to death after remaining trapped for nearly eight hours inside their mangled WagonR. Their vehicle had been hit twice from behind by an unidentified heavy vehicle at 11.30 pm on the Delhi-Mumbai expressway near Nuh, leaving the car mangled beyond recognition. Cars whizzed past the whole night, but no one stopped to help. The police reached the spot only around 7.30 am the next morning after being informed by a patrol team. By the time both husband and wife were taken to a hospital, they had died from blood loss, which doctors say, could have been prevented had they been taken to a hospital on time. Despite the psychological trauma that accident victims and their families suffer, the government has not come up with a single sustained campaign on the pressing need for road safety. It is the same story with deaths from fire, where we have no sustained pan-India safety campaign to help prevent such accidents.

Another area where the government is sorely lacking is crowd management, especially at our religious sites. The government wants to boast of numbers, and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had upped the media blitz to show how 50 million pilgrims had attended the Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj. Yet, when over 100 people died and scores were injured on January 29, 2025, both the state and central governments tried to underplay the accident.

Just a month later, chaos erupted at the New Delhi Railway Station on February 15 when a stampede occurred at the overcrowded station, killing 18 people and injuring many more. Once again, this incident was underplayed because these victims were heading for the Kumbh Mela. The silence of the victims was bought with railway officials distributing money to the injured and to the families of the dead at the station itself. If disasters are underplayed, how can corrective measures be introduced to prevent a reoccurrence of such incidents?

Again, last year, on June 29, during the Rath Yatra procession in Puri, Odisha, a stampede left three dead and more than 50 injured. This, again, was a case of gross crowd mismanagement with adequate police bandobast not being in place. Another crowd crush occurred on June 4, when jubilation turned to horror in Bengaluru as a massive crowd gathered near Chinnaswamy Stadium to celebrate Royal Challenger’s first IPL title. A stampede broke out, killing 11 people and injuring 33. The police were completely overwhelmed, but once again public safety was given the least amount of priority. The state police head was suspended, but how many politicians were taken to task over this breakdown of public safety? Not one, as has been the case with earlier crowd crushes this year.

The story of the absence of crowd control was repeated yet again on September 27, 2025, at a political rally held by actor-politician Vijay and his party, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, in Karur, Tamil Nadu, which left 41 dead and dozens injured. Once again, the overcrowded venue and the seven-hour delay in Vijay’s arrival caused the crush, with police advice on crowd control being ignored by the organisers. Vijay may have been reprimanded by the Supreme Court, but he was recently seen addressing yet another rally in Tamil Nadu.  

Indeed, the chronology of these tragedies follows a familiar pattern. Rather than focus on the rigours of daily governance, priority is given to the optics of political grandstanding. This article is not looking at the hundreds of lives that are being lost on an annual basis due to natural disasters, which have escalated exponentially due to faulty infrastructural planning. Modi’s objective is to build a Viksit Bharat by 2047. But that can only be ensured if there is a rigorous focus on implementing safety norms in every sphere of our lives. Crowd management norms and civic discipline must be ensured. And yet, each time we face a road, rail or air accident, or a stampede, those in positions of power are the first to shrug off their responsibility. Instead of the faceless and powerless Indian paying with his life, it is time our political and bureaucratic classes were made accountable in order to ensure that we as a nation do not lurch from one disaster to another.