Singed by brazen illegality

How much does a human life cost? In industrial India, where labour is too often a buyer’s market and human lives are variable cost, there is no straight answer. New Delhi may have celebrated Fire Services Week recently, but the national capital region has since January witnessed no fewer than six fire accidents, most of them caused by short circuits. Four of those mishaps occurred in April, even as a blistering summer set in across the region.

At 6 am on April 9, workers at a shoe factory in Sultanpuri woke up to find a fire raging around them. Migrants from Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh, the men were in the habit of sleeping on the premises at the end of each workday. The factory owner had, as usual, locked the main door from the outside. Trapped inside the burning building, the workers had no escape route other than the windows on the top and ground floor. Neighbours brought gunny sacks and ladders to help the men descend from the windows. However, of the around 50 persons in the building, four perished in the blaze, including two juveniles.

Risky neighbour: The shoe factory was run out of a residential colony and did not have a fire safety certificate

Kusum, one of the neighbours who rushed to the workers’ rescue, runs a kirana shop further down the street. She says the deaths could have been averted had the electricity board cut the power supply on time. “They didn’t cut the electricity till eight, despite being informed by 6.30 am,” she says.

At Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Mangolpuri, the parents of the deceased juveniles were inconsolable. The post-mortem reports stated that the two youngsters, Shan Mohammed and Ayub, had been brought in with 90 and 60 per cent burns, respectively, and had died due to suffocation from the fumes. The other victims — Raj Mohammed and Mehboob Barish — died on the spot.

While the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), the authority that certifies commercial establishments under the Air/Water Act, declined to comment, the High Court directed New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) to look into the matter. Sub-inspector Dinesh Dahiya of Sultanpuri police station, who was part of the preliminary investigation team, is dismissive about the tragedy. “We receive complaints about such incidents every other day. It is a bad area... the women are going missing, and the guys are on smack,” he says.

The police investigation revealed that the factory did not have a fire safety certification. The owner, Biresh Gupta, and his son, Nitesh (28), in whose name the factory was run, are in police remand till further notice. The owner, who also lives in the same colony, has been charged under Section 285 — namely, criminal negligence with regard to fire or combustible matter, and Section 304 (causing death by negligence). His neighbours, however, do not see any wrongdoing by him in running a factory in a residential colony. “People need to earn, and if the youth are not provided jobs, what will they do, if not turn to crime? This isn’t the owner’s fault,” says Kusum. In fact, the municipality’s court-mandated sealing drives against unsafe commercial establishments were met with public resistance across the city.

Barely days after the horrific Sultanpuri factory blaze, two workers died after a fire broke out at a crockery factory in Nawada, West Delhi, on April 17. On April 22, two employees were charred to death at a four-storey jeans factory in Shahdara’s Gandhi Nagar.

Faizan (22) and Sehmat (30) were working overtime, ironing clothes, and didn’t realise that a fire had broken out on the ground floor. While the residents on the floor above escaped through the terrace, the factory workers were engulfed by the fire.

Playing unsafe

Kunal Sharma, an expert on industrial hazards and disasters explains that factory safety guidelines framed by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and other international guidelines are in place, but it is the local administration (in this case, the district magistrate and municipal corporations) that must enforce them.

“At present, no audits are conducted in Delhi to ensure the safety of older commercial buildings. Licences are obtained at the time of construction, but no checks are done thereafter to ensure they’re still okay to operate. Fire incidents are increasingly common in the city’s mini-industrial pockets that developed after factories were shifted to the suburbs, and illegal construction thrives under the gaze of the local administration.”

On January 21, as many as 17 workers died after a fire quickly enveloped their three-storey plastics factory in Bawana. Investigations showed the fire started in the factory’s firecracker storage unit. Moreover, the person running the factory was not the one in whose name it was registered. It took the firefighters 90 minutes to contain the blaze.

Snatched by callousness: Grieving relatives of a woman who died in a fire that broke out at a plastics factory in Bawana in January

In 2017 alone, the Bawana industrial area — spread over 2,100 acres — witnessed more than 450 fire emergencies and five instances of fire-related deaths. In the case of the Bawana plastics factory and the Sultanpuri shoe factory, the fact that the owners had locked the building from the outside — a practice that is all too common in the city — contributed to a higher death toll.

Many fire accidents can be traced to illegal factories, but even those that are licensed are far from blameless. As Sharma explains, “Even if factories obtain licences in the beginning, the life of a factory has a fixed limit. There is no directive from the government to check if the factory has become a hazard after its shelf-life.”

Last year, following two complaints from citizens, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had directed the Delhi government, DPCC, and other authorities to inspect illegal industries that were highly polluting, and to work towards their closure. Before that, the Environmental Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) had informed the Delhi government that illegal industries located in residential and non-conforming areas were a significant source of pollution. According to a newspaper report, 70,000 to one lakh such industries are operating in Delhi, all of them surviving on legal loopholes. Any show-cause notice issued to them under the Air and Water Act amounts to recognising them, and hence defeats the purpose of shutting them down.

Back to hazardous ways

In 2004, the Supreme Court (SC) had ordered the Delhi government to shut down illegal industries, but more than a decade later, they continue to thrive. Back then, illegal units were informed through public notices that they would be given the option to shift to allotted industrial plots. But there were few takers — of the estimated 93,000 units targeted, only 513 responded. The court had further observed that on the one hand industries in non-conforming areas were being asked to relocate, while on the other the MCD was issuing new licences for new units in these areas. “The illegal industrialisation in residential/non-conforming area commenced and has continued and the authority, the governments, and its agencies have been totally negligent in discharge of its functions and obligations under the provision of the DD act (Delhi Development Act, 1957),” the order said.

It is anyone’s guess whether the state legislature and the judiciary can arrive at a consensus on the issue. The impasse has clearly benefited the violators. Since fire is a state subject, the local body needs to act swiftly to ensure that Delhi’s buildings are fireproofed at the earliest. Meanwhile, as fire incidents remain the third-leading cause of deaths in the country, and the fire department is stuck with outdated and inadequate machinery (for instance, only four skylifts serve entire Delhi), the country also leads worldwide in the number of industrial accidents. This is a deathly cocktail for the poor who are forced to work in factories under unsafe conditions.

Under the Delhi Master Plan 2021, residential areas can no longer accommodate industrial or commercial establishments. The DDA has been negotiating with the Supreme Court on this matter. While the court ordered closing down the establishments with immediate effect, the DDA and three MCDs have proposed amendments to the master plan to protect some of these establishments. However, the Supreme Court pulled them up last month for their failure to submit affidavits for the amendments. The master plan is a guide for the city’s sustainable development, keeping its global stature in mind, as well as its environment, land pressure and migration issues. The court expressed its displeasure in no uncertain terms, querying whether the DDA had made an environment impact assessment before proposing the amendments: “This dadagiri has to stop. You can’t tell the court that you keep passing orders, but we will do what we want to. Is this rule of law?” The moot question then is: If the authorities aren’t concerned about following the law, then who is?

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