DNA Edit: Lest we forget – Guilty in the bridge crash must face serious charges

A foot overbridge connecting the most important railway station collapses in Mumbai and six people die. The bridge collapses because a civic officer thinks adding granite to a decades-old bridge will beautify it, not thinking of the weight.  A stampede kills 23 people at Elphinstone Road railway station after rumours of a short circuit goes off. The stampede happens because the railway administration has not thought about adding more FoBs to ease the crowd. A footpath on a railway overbridge collapses as the callous authorities keep on piling up the weight on it, totally ignoring the load-bearing capacity of the rest of the structure. Two die and the railway traffic on Mumbai’s suburban rail network comes to a halt for almost seven hours. All these in the space of two years. 

In a city that is being governed by so many different authorities that it has now become convenient for all of them to blame the tragedy on any one of them. Passing the buck begins as soon as the city witnesses flooding, building collapse, or a major fire. The city where the civic body has a budget of Rs 30,692 crore. The city that also receives funds from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority through a budget of Rs 16,909 crore. The city that is the capital of Maharashtra, a state that boasted of having a $1 trillion economy by 2025. This is the city that the late Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh had said he would turn into Shanghai. This is the city of so-called dreams. This has now become the city of deaths caused by callous and ignorant babus who care about nothing but saving their skin, and by netas seeking their pound of flesh. The promises by the powers that be have now become jokes, really. 

The guilty will be punished, no one will be spared, we will overhaul the infrastructure, fresh audits will be conducted of all bridges, roads, restaurants, high-rises, fire preparedness (depending on the latest mishap)…so on and so forth. There is no shame left. Our babus don’t care. Our netas are busy politicising the grief and sufferings of the people and will come to us seeking votes, offering fresh promises of transforming the city, state, country as the General Elections loom large. We don’t ask questions to our leaders, our administration. We don’t insist on accountability. We forget. The 26/7 rains that drowned the city for over three days were unprecedented and the authorities could not have prepared for it for all practical purposes. 

But not Thursday’s FoB collapse, not the Kamala Mills fire, not the Marol hospital fire, not the Andheri rail overbridge collapse. Deaths caused in these and many such accidents should be treated as culpable homicide not amounting to murder and both the administration and netas responsible for them should be brought to book, that too via fast-track courts. That’s the only way to resolve this.