London Bridge Falling?

Shantanu Thakur (thakur.santanu@gmail.com)

Hopefully not, though the rhyme does raise the frightening idea in a sing-song way, probably as a precaution for the kids to stay prepared for any eventuality. One doesn’t quite know when the sky might fall! There has, perhaps, been a mistake in the placement of the locale; public convenience structures in India have been falling left and right, the latest being the accident at state-of-the-art airport terminal buildings. One doesn’t feel like taking it lightly at all; these off-and-on accidents need a very serious look at what is going wrong in Hindustan Hamara. One is no longer safe with a roof over one’s head, not even in upscale airport terminals.

The long list is scary and disappointing: Morbi bridge in Gujrat; Vivekananda fly-over in Kolkata; flooding in Delhi’s new underpasses, etcetera. One doesn’t need to be a trained architect or a structural engineer to understand some of the reasons why such public infrastructure has been crumbling so often. The pace at which the country’s infrastructure boom has escalated has created several problems in its wake: negligent oversight by contractors, a lack of timely inspections even with outdated inspection manuals, and perhaps a shortage of staff as well. But all this must have been buttressed with obvious corruption and conflicts of interest. Times have changed, and alongside that, newer technology and methods of construction have also emerged. Today’s airport terminal buildings look far different from what they were decades earlier, but nevertheless, the earlier brick, stone, and mortar structures at least held on; there’s hardly any remembrance of them collapsing unless bombed down during war. These huge, new structures must be made safe from the ever-escalating turbulence from nature, which is getting to be the new normal. Earlier, one was told that even a private RCC house was expected to last at least a century. One would, therefore, expect our modern public structures to last even longer and not fall prey to foretold heavy monsoon showers.

The PWD—the department long associated with building public works—used to deliver durable, long-lasting facilities all over the place. The structures they built would sure suffer from wear and tear accompanied by a gradual lack of maintenance, but they stood their ground. All over greater Assam in the good old days, the department successfully constructed durable, usable roads, bridges, tunnels, hospitals, circuit houses, and the like, most of which outlived their approved life span. The elegant Assam-type buildings that once graced the skyline in all towns even survived earthquakes. In cases where they crashed, there was minimal damage to life and property. All this was due to the quality of construction, the quality of materials used, regular inspection, as well as a culture of healthy practices in the selection of contractors and the allotment of work. Those days, one would witness teams of inspectors along almost every new road that was under construction. Some of them even put up under small tents along the highway whenever accommodation at the circuit house, or, dak-bungalow nearby wasn’t available. Today, supervision of public works has fallen visibly short. The public doesn’t get to know whether completed works have received certification of compliance and adherence to norms and standards. During the British era, one is told, the concerned authority would even intimate the government when the life span of a structure was officially over.

Now, with heavy, large-scale infrastructure springing up all over the country, insistence on quality work and safeguards needs to be given much more priority than earlier. The everyday utilisation of these facilities has also increased manifold. Any negligence runs the risk of endangering lives. There have also been several instances of callous, shoddy planning that have resulted in many of these projects being either incomplete, closed, or hanging in limbo. The commercial capital of the country itself suffers from many of these ill-planned infrastructure projects. Closer home, we in Assam have also had disturbing news of hospital roofs crumbling within just a year or two of the inauguration, cracks appearing in the foundation pillars of long bridges over the Brahmaputra even during construction, and not being attended to until a media hue and cry is raised. One can well visualise the scale of probable, but avoidable, catastrophes that might happen with unchecked quality of construction coupled with a lack of disaster preparedness to swing swiftly into rescue operations.

The tale about the cowherd trying to shake off his boredom with false alarms to the villagers comes to mind. When the real tiger arrived, no one responded. In our case, it’s perhaps the reverse; the dreaded tiger is already on the prowl, but we refuse to see it. There are too many issues to which we have given scant attention. Our cities turn non-functional every time it rains, yet we allow it to repeat itself. The agencies responsible fail to work in tandem, despite known solutions elsewhere in the world. It may be in human nature to be concerned about disasters in the immediate aftermath, only to soon forget it. Negligence lurks like the devil, striking at the earliest opportunity of complacence. In times of stress and turmoil that society witnesses currently, the tendency to sweep problems under the rug may be a sad, common symptom of the state of affairs, but it is all in its own peril. The virus of corruption, negligence, and substandard quality of work has become so pandemic that engaging in blame games will serve no worthwhile purpose unless we together stem this culture of suicidal carelessness.