India's everyday hazards: A silent emergency in plain sight

Time of India

07-06-2025

V. Raghunathan is a former Director of the Schulich School of Business (India Program), York University, Toronto, a former professor at IIM Ahmedabad and a former President of ING Vysya Bank. A prolific author, he has written over 15 books, including the national bestseller Games Indians Play (Penguin). With more than 600 published papers and articles, his latest books include The Lion, The Admiral, and A Cat Called B. Uma Vijaylakshmi (Westland, 2025) and To Every Parent; To Every Child (Penguin, 2025) and Irrationally Rational: 10 Nobel Laureates Script the Story of Behavioural Economics (Penguin 2022), among others. LESS ... MORE
The recent Bangalore stampede is a tragedy beyond words—heartbreakingly; all the more so as it followed a moment of joyous celebration. Yet, perhaps such moments of collective mourning are precisely when we ought to pause and reflect—not just on this singular horror, but on the unsettling frequency with which such disasters dot our national landscape.
A leading national daily recently compiled a grim catalogue of stampedes in India since 2003. In 2024–25 alone, alongside the Bangalore tragedy, there were the Lairai Jatra stampede at Goa's Shree Lairai Devi Temple; a midnight crush at New Delhi Railway Station; a pre-dawn surge at the Maha Kumbh's Sangam; chaos at Tirumala Hills' Vaikunta Dwara Darshanam; mayhem at a blockbuster screening in Hyderabad's Sandhya Theatre; a deadly crush at Bihar's Baba Siddhnath Temple; and yet another calamity at a 'satsang' held by the self-styled godman Bhole Baba in Hathras. The list is long, and heartbreakingly so. Hundreds of lives lost, many preventable, yet the pattern remains disturbingly familiar.
But the problem is not the stampedes themselves—they are merely the headline symptom of a far deeper ailment: a structural failure where safety is a luxury, and public infrastructure is either overwhelmed, corrupt, or indifferent. In a country where crossing a road can be a hazardous gamble with fate, the real question is not just why stampedes or accidents happen, but why we accept such lapses with such chronic, unblinking indifference—as if this were simply the way things must be.
Despite visible strides in technology, space exploration, finance, and other fields, India remains one of the physically least safe places to live—not from dramatic crime or conflict, but from the mundane hazards woven into daily life.
Few aspects of public life capture India's everyday peril more vividly than its roads—a subject so frequently lamented it now provokes little more than a weary yawn. Yet the statistics are anything but dull: India suffers the highest number of road accident fatalities worldwide. Our streets are theatres of unrelenting disorder—vehicles weaving and jostling heedless of lanes or signals; pedestrians threading through traffic streams; overloaded trucks stacked with loose boulders rumbling alongside vulnerable cyclists and two-wheelers. Even the infrastructure meant to protect—like foot-high, poorly marked speed breakers—causes more accidents than it prevents, becoming death traps in the name of caution. Traffic rules, where they exist, seem more aspirational than real. Wrong-side driving, red-light jumping, unchecked speeding, mid-traffic wheelies, and the near-total absence of pedestrian pathways are not exceptions—they're the norm, even in our 'smart' cities.
What's truly tragic is not just the risk, but the normalisation of it. A child dodging vehicles on the way to school, a family riding a motorbike without helmets, or a man napping on a crowded footpath—these are not anomalies but everyday vignettes, seen as almost poetic proof of Indian resilience, rather than glaring failures of policy and enforcement.
India's rail and bus systems move millions daily, yet their very design often compromises safety and dignity. Trains are packed beyond capacity, with passengers clinging to doors or even riding rooftops. Platform gaps, slippery footbridges, and overstretched ticketing systems leave little room for safe travel. Urban buses stop mid-traffic, forcing passengers to board and alight while dodging speeding vehicles. Bus stops are illogically placed; platforms remain misaligned with train floors; buses are still not uniformly required to have doors that close. Meanwhile, trucks overloaded with cargo stacked three times their height rumble unchallenged.
Emergency protocols? Patchy at best. Signage? Minimal. The unspoken social contract is clear: commuters must fend for themselves. This silent agreement comes with a steep price—when accidents scale into disasters.
Occupational safety in India is a ticking time bomb. Construction workers scale scaffolding without helmets or harnesses in bare feet; sanitation workers clean sewers manually, inhaling toxic gases without protective gear; industrial fires rage in illegal or uninspected units, often killing dozens—many underage or undocumented. Workplace deaths rarely lead to reform or compensation. The informal sector, employing the majority, thrives in a grey zone of lax regulation and inspection.
Major fires in commercial complexes, wedding halls, schools, and hospitals have become disturbingly frequent. Often these buildings lack basic fire safety—no exits, non-functional extinguishers, blocked staircases, or illegal wiring. In Delhi and Mumbai alone, thousands openly defy fire norms while operating in broad daylight. Aging, crumbling buildings remain unflagged for demolition.
Safety basics—evacuation plans, fire drills, emergency lighting—are treated as optional luxuries until tragedy prompts momentary outrage. The problem isn't a lack of rules but a systemic failure of enforcement, fuelled by corruption. Local authorities routinely permit violations for bribes, and then this revolving door of officials, with frequent transfers every few months or years, further entrenches the problem, ensuring that violations become permanent sources of illicit revenue for future rather than risks to public safety.
Come monsoon, cities are paralysed by waterlogging, overflowing drains, submerged vehicles, collapsing roads, and electrocution from exposed wires. Open manholes and missing drain covers pose lethal traps, especially for children and elderly pedestrians. The monsoon is predictable—yet every year cities flounder under clogged drains, ill-equipped infrastructure, and slow or absent disaster responses.
India's healthcare system is a patchwork of world-class pockets and terrifying inadequacies. In many government hospitals, hygiene is abysmal, patients lie on floors, street dogs roam wards, and emergency services buckle under demand. Ambulances get stuck in traffic, oxygen runs out, and hospital fires claim lives of those too ill to escape. These aren't just the flaws of poverty but symptoms of systemic disregard for emergency preparedness.
A walk through any Indian town reveals a jungle of low-hanging electrical wires, exposed fuse boxes, and precariously perched transformers. Illegal connections and open switchboards abound, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, creating constant electrocution hazards—rain or shine. Even in some upscale buildings, faulty wiring and unauthorised extensions abound, with safety audits often perfunctory or corrupted.
Air pollution in Indian cities regularly breaches 'hazardous' levels. Toxic smog, untreated industrial waste, lead-contaminated groundwater, and garbage encroaching on living spaces cause respiratory illness, cancer, and developmental disorders. These are long-term policy failures with irreversible consequences.
Rural India faces its own hazards—arsenic in drinking water, pesticide overuse, and heatstroke during intensifying summers—with scant public health infrastructure.
Why do these dangers persist? Is it a failure of culture or governance? India does not lack laws, technical expertise, or talent. What it lacks is enforcement, accountability, and a genuine culture of safety. Hazards have been accepted, internalised and normalised—crumbling walls, overloaded trucks, frayed poles—branded as 'jugaad' or ingenuity. But this ingenuity has a body count.
Regulators are understaffed, corrupt or often indifferent, inspections rare, and violations negotiable. Citizens, too, often knowingly complicit.
Safety cannot remain an afterthought; it must be integral to the very blueprint of our cities, workplaces, homes, and institutions. This requires more than policy—it demands a cultural shift beginning with education and sustained by awareness. Accountability must extend to those in power: public officials and elected representatives must be held answerable for systemic lapses. The Lokpal, envisioned as a bulwark against corruption, should evolve into a genuinely empowered constitutional body with a mandate that includes enforcing public safety—not in token form, but in earnest. At the very least, the current government—which enjoys a decisive public mandate—needs to acknowledge that it rose to power on the promise of a robust, empowered and a functioning Lokpal.
Every avoidable accident should be recognised not as personal tragedy but as an indictment of failed policy—and those responsible must face consequences. Civic bodies must be equipped with resources, but also subjected to rigorous oversight and transparent public audit. Enforcement agencies must function independently, unshackled by political or commercial pressures. Above all, citizens must insist on safety—not as a privilege, but as an essential right, central to the promise of democratic governance.
Is that a tall order? Perhaps—but that is precisely what governance ought to mean: not the pursuit of personal glory or the entitlements of high office, but the sober, everyday duty of serving the public good. If power is to have purpose, it must be measured not by motorcades and ribbon-cuttings, but by safer roads, functioning hospitals, honest enforcement, and lives spared from preventable tragedies.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.