Fall of a Hoarding

THERE IS NO escaping forces of na­ture when they get angry, but what human beings have been able to do is adapt and mitigate the damage. How good a functioning system is depends on how this equation plays out. And it played out very badly this week in Mumbai when people who had gone to fill fuel at a petrol pump suddenly saw a giant hoarding fall and crush them, along with their vehicles. The count so far is 16 dead and many more injured. The immediate reason was an unexpected thunderstorm that saw wind speeds of 96 kilometres per hour, much above normal. It was sweltering summer and what happened was unex­pected, and one could argue that these are contingencies that can’t be planned for. Except that once you remove the layer of what can’t be controlled, like a rotten onion, peel after peel of human responsibility becomes evident.

There is a maximum limit to how tall hoardings can be. It is set by the civic body, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). This one was three times that size. But it was in plain sight, so its illegality was wilfully ignored. BMC said it stood on land in the posses­sion of the government railway police and passed the buck to the railways. The owner of the agency that put up the hoarding turned out to be someone with a number of criminal cases against him. He was absconding but predictably got caught because when the govern­ment really wants to do something, it will. Only when it comes to the regular oiling of the wheels does everyone in the system feel they have a right to cut corners. Every once in a while, the corruption has consequences serious enough to stare you right in the face. As when a 250-tonne sheet of metal comes crashing down.

When systems get ossified then it becomes near-impossible to change them. BMC is a good example of it. The contracts it gives out for road works and repairs, for instance, have been riddled with corruption and incompetence for decades. Contractors get caught and blacklisted, their names announced in newspapers, and then you find they are back again and the roads remain pock­marked with potholes that multiply after every rainfall. For decades, octroi was the biggest money-spinner and it could never be fixed. The corruption ended when octroi itself disappeared after GST came into force. That is the only way to make government bodies accountable, to whittle away their pow­ers so much that there is very little left for them to do. Instead, what happens after such a tragedy is for the govern­ment to take more power onto itself, using the same crisis that they them­selves had a hand in creating. Now that the hoarding has fallen, they are asking an engineering college to find out how it happened. But what are the odds of such an unusual accident to ever repeat again, especially given how diligently safety rules will now be enforced? In­stead the next one will come from some other corrupted corner.

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