A country still failing its fire safety test yet again
The Lucknow and Delhi fires are not isolated disasters but symptoms of a deeper governance failure, turning negligence into a national hazard
Fourteen young people, most of them students and staff at a coaching-cum-gaming centre in Lucknow’s Aliganj, died on June 22 when fire tore through the building they were working in. The visuals were chillingly familiar: panicked youngsters jumping from windows, fire tenders struggling through narrow lanes, a chief minister cutting short his tour to visit the dead. It had happened before — barely three weeks earlier, in Delhi, where 21 people, many of them foreign nationals who had come to the city seeking medical treatment, burned to death in a guesthouse with no valid fire safety certificate. Two cities, two tragedies, one unchanged answer to the question of why: India has still not learned to keep its buildings from killing the people inside them. The two fires look different on the surface — a gaming zone and coaching institute in one city, a budget hotel in another — but strip away the location and the post-mortem is identical. A commercial activity was running inside a structure never built, inspected, or certified for it. A narrow staircase was often the only way out. Combustible material — foam seating, plastic partitions, electronics, bedding — fed the flames once they started. And nobody in the chain of approval seems to have asked whether the building could empty itself in an emergency. That is the real culprit, and it is not one person. It is a system that treats fire safety as paperwork rather than physics. Municipal bodies issue occupancy and trade licenses without verifying clearances from the fire department; fire departments, chronically short-staffed, cannot audit even a fraction of the buildings under their charge; owners convert residential and storage spaces into hotels, coaching centres, and gaming arcades because the rent is higher than the cost of compliance; and enforcement, when it happens at all, follows the fire rather than precedes it.
In Delhi, a cook has been arrested and a case has been registered against unnamed persons — a formulation that conveniently keeps the officials who cleared or ignored the building’s status out of the dock. Lucknow’s probe has barely begun, but the script rarely changes: a few low-level arrests, a compensation cheque, a promise of audits, and silence once the cameras leave. This is not India’s first warning. Uphaar Cinema in 1997, the Surat tuition-centre fire in 2019, the Anaj Mandi factory blaze that same year, hospital fires since — each produced the same commissions, the same recommendations, and the same inertia. Fire safety byelaws already exist on paper.
What is missing is the political will to make violating them costlier than complying with them, and the administrative capacity to actually check. What would change this is unglamorous but specific: independent, surprise fire audits instead of self-certification by owners; criminal liability that reaches the municipal and fire officials who sign off on unsafe buildings, not only the staff on the ground; a public, searchable database of which commercial buildings hold a valid fire clearance; and prosecutions fast enough that cases don’t quietly die in years of litigation. Until that changes, the next fire is not a possibility — it is a certainty waiting for an address. The only question is which city’s name fills the headline next.
