It was a tragedy that 93 lives were lost in a hospital in Kolkata owing to a fire. Then there were a series of articles on poor fire safety measures in civic hospitals in the city. I suppose the situation must not be different in government and private hospitals too. I had written the administration when I became head of the department that there should be fire extinguishers in our laboratory, which had a number of inflammable laboratory reagents. I had also written that the exit points of our department should not be locked and their keys kept with someone not on the spot, because should there be a fire, there would be deaths due to stampede to get out, and also from burns due to being trapped in the fire. All my letters went unanswered.
"There must be a reason for them not to answer our letters" consoled another professor.
"What reason can there be?" I wondered.
"Perhaps they know we have a special burns ward in the hospital" said the cynic in the department. It sounded cruel.
"Perhaps they have no money to spend on these measures, and no security officers to man the gates if they are left open."
That sounded possible. I do not mean to say it sounded justifiable. I spoke to the Dean of that time, who nodded with a look of great wisdom and said nothing. That Dean moved on to higher positions after retirement, and luckily no patient or patient's relative moved on to a higher world due to a fire.
Now suddenly everyone seems to have woken up, with the civic chief ordering audit and implementation of fire prevention and control measures in major civic hospitals. I hope the same is done for other civic and government hospitals too. There are too many patients in these hospitals, most of them poor. There will be far more deaths from a fire in such hospitals as compared to a star hospital in Kolkata.
"Sir, what happened to your letters to the administration for fire control measures?" someone asked yesterday.
"Probably the same thing that happens to unwanted letters" I said. "It takes a disaster or a court order for moving people into action, not letters."
