I have written this before, and I’d write it again. There is no value for the life of the commoner in my motherland. This country doesn’t care. Its politicians and bureaucrats don’t have any empathy. But can we blame them? They didn’t come from Mars. They came from us. We lack empathy, and we deserve nothing more than what we have got now.
In the last few days, two horrifying tragedies struck. There is nothing new about them, except the dull, numbing realisation that the cheapest thing in this bloody country is human life. The cynic in me would ask: how can you break an already broken system?
In the national capital, a residential building suddenly caved in, burying innocent students beneath tonnes of concrete. On a National Highway in Kerala, eight young college students from Tamil Nadu were killed instantly when their vehicle collided with unauthorised, unlit trucks abandoned in the fast lane. The highway patrol hadn’t seen the illegally parked trucks, or they didn’t care.
In this series of failures, one institution on this stretch of highway worked commendably well: the toll booths. That institution works with efficiencies that rival Japanese or German systems. We should be proud. Something is working in this broken land.
Outside the social media and PR push, what we have are patches of wide, eight-lane stretches that abruptly choke into single-lane diversions without warning signs, lane markings or lighting. Cows, thousands of them, have gone feral after being abandoned by farmers and occupy many stretches of our unlit highways at night. Sometimes, flyovers under construction end abruptly in an abyss, with no warning sign or barricade. Random speed-control bumps appear in fast lanes, or local police put up rusting barriers with no reflectors or signs.
One of the most beautiful sights marking our country’s rapid development is overloaded trucks sticking to the fast lane on the right of a six-lane road. The other two lanes usually have another two trucks keeping company like friends going to a drunken party, slowing the entire traffic to a crawl. You somehow manage to overtake this circus, and suddenly the highway becomes a single, unpaved lane with traffic coming from all directions.
Fixing any of this, apparently, is nobody’s duty. The horror in Delhi exposed an even deeper rot in urban administration. Bare kilometres from the official residences of the Prime Minister and the President, emergency response crawled with agonising slowness. Compounding the chaos, local mobile networks reportedly jammed when trapped victims and desperate families needed help the most. Left entirely on their own, helpless citizens were forced to arrange private logistical transport and delivery apps simply to ferry the injured to hospitals.
We blame politicians for most things. And many of them deserve the blame. But there is a bigger culprit: the overlords of red tape, the feudal lords of responsibility. They need not face elections like the poor politicians. I don’t know how the goblin in the system who ordered the mobile network to be jammed when children were buried under debris can sleep peacefully. Maybe they are a different species from humans.
In any developed or half-civilised nation, such deliberate dereliction would invite fierce legal consequences. In the UK, corporate bodies can face prosecution under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, while individuals may face gross negligence manslaughter charges. In the US, municipal bodies can face enormous civil liabilities for failures resulting in deaths. In countries such as Singapore, building-control violations can result in imprisonment, punitive fines, and professional sanctions.
In the country that calls itself Vishwaguru, accountability seems to stop at the condolence message. No one goes to jail. No wonder our country prizes the government job so much. Where else can one fatten oneself with zero responsibility and minimum effort? All you have to do is pass one examination in life by mugging up some irrelevant facts, and you become the overlord of all, responsible for nothing. In a somewhat civilised or semi-barbaric country, lawmakers would make some effort to rein in this heartless system. But since we are a spiritual civilisation that seems remarkably indifferent to human suffering, I don’t think politicians will do anything about it.
Not that what I am going to say is ever going to happen, but I wish the higher judiciary would step in through suo motu cognisance. I hope there will be a day when the courts slap crushing punitive decrees on municipal corporations and highway authorities.
If a citizen falls into a drain because of a missing manhole cover, I want the mayor and the officials responsible to face consequences. I want damages paid to grieving families, where culpability is established, from the salaries, assets, and personal wealth of those responsible. Only when a bureaucrat’s personal liberty and wealth are at stake will human life finally be valued over bureaucratic convenience. Until then, let’s make peace with crumbling buildings, deadly highways, and man-eating potholes. Who said your life or mine has any value? Pay your taxes, pay your tolls, fill your vehicles with sugarcane juice and sing the national song with pride. After all, we believe in many births. A few of them can presumably be sacrificed to fatten some corrupt bureaucrat’s or politician’s purse.
mail@asura.co.in
