It is ridiculous to ask what the causes are behind the Bagree market going up in flames. The question is whether there was any cause, any single cause, why the building should not have been engulfed by fire. Between April 2002 and March 2018, there have been 13 major fires in Calcutta - nine of them in markets and warehouses - with deaths, loss and waste. Now a major market has been added to the list. Calcutta's uniqueness in this sphere is hard won. The predominant causes common to all are traditional and unchanged - complete laxity in implementing fire-safety measures; blithe corruption in giving and renewing licences that ensure all requirements have been met; a total lack of monitoring; unchecked 'hooking' of electricity together with unregulated tangles of exposed wires; ancient wiring systems with increasing loads; overcrowded market spaces accommodating as many traders as can squeeze in; casually unscientific systems of storing flammable commodities so that the minimum is spent on safety, and an overall attitude of easy-going but consuming greed that ignores not just civic sense but also, stupidly enough, the future.
In administrative failures and accompanying populism, no government has been different in the matter of fire safety. Otherwise, the massive fire in Nandaram market a little over 10 years ago could well have been taken as a turning point in the rigorous implementation of fire-safety laws in the case of markets. Neither the administration nor the public was bothered. Temporary licences with a condition that fire-safety measures will be implemented within the year were given to traders in Bagree market two months ago after inspection. Why? With their Puja stocks in ashes, are the traders happy? Encroachment by hawkers made movement of fire trucks enormously difficult, apart from the fact that their presence increased the fire hazard. Why, as in so many other places in the city, were they allowed to settle where they endangered passage? There is no guarantee, even now, that the tragedy of traders and their more vulnerable workers will not be repeated. For, characteristically, the politicians have begun to speak. While the chief Opposition in the state is deciding to take out processions against the Trinamul Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party is assiduously trying to create conflict. It smells "conspiracy". Whose?
