All India Minority Human Rights supporters hold a silent rally for victim's of a fire that broke out at the Advance Medicare And Research Institute (AMRI) hospital in the eastern city of Kolkata on December 10, 2011.STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images
The ongoing investigation into a hospital fire that killed 96 people in Calcutta last week is unearthing a litany of shocking errors – and peeling back the curtain on the shiny façade of wealthy India.
The fire took place at the AMRI Hospital, one of the elite private medical institutions that dot India's big urban centres. These hospitals provide the latest in diagnostic and surgical procedures, offer wealthy patients multi-room in-patient suites, "platinum waiting lounges" and charge as much as $1,000 a day as a basic bed rate – not much, compared to private medical care in the West, but fees accessible only to a tiny Indian elite.
But as details released in the past few days from the investigation of the fire make clear, the "first world care" offered by the hospital was only skin deep.
The hospital had no working sprinkler system, and no functioning smoke alarms. Staff had no fire training and many members fled when the blaze began in the early hours of the morning. Hospital management was storing diesel and other highly flammable materials in the basement – as fuel for generators, to cover for frequent power outages – as well as trash, much of which was also highly combustible, including boxes, gas cylinders, electric cable and old mattresses that released dense smoke when they went up in flames.
Many mobile patients suffocated in their rooms, where the windows were sealed shut, and from which there was no fire escape route. The detail that has most appalled Indians is that the hospital's private security guards turned away both residents of the local slum who rushed up to help when they saw the blaze (because fire departments respond so slowly here, neighbours are often the first respondents), locking them out at the gate – and also fire fighters when the first of 25 trucks arrived, two hours after the blaze began.
This response seemed inexplicable – until an investigation by the Times of India revealed that in October, when a private security guard in the hospital found a small fire and called the fire department, hospital management suspended him without pay in punishment.
When the Calcutta fire department launched an inspection of other private city hospitals in the wake of the AMRI fire, it found that most lacked working fire alarms, and many were storing waste onsite. Several had approach lanes too narrow for fire-tending vehicles to reach them, and dysfunctional hose systems.
Probhir Rose, director of Woodland, one of the city's oldest and most prestigious hospitals, reacted angrily to suggestions his hospital was unsafe, telling the Indian Express that his facility had a fire alarm system, they just weren't using it. Nine owners and administrators of the AMRI Hospital have so far been arrested in connection with their responsibility for the blaze.
The fatalities in the AMRI fire are a reminder that while India's better-off citizens look to the private sector to provide what the weak state doesn't – good schools, street cleaning, policing, clean water, and of course medical care – there are no guarantees to be had from this sector either. Building codes and safety procedures are routinely violated and the government agencies tasked with oversight are toothless regulators with no capacity for enforcement.
Investigators in the AMRI fire have suggested that the hospital's administrators were paying bribes to inspectors in lieu of spending money on fire safety equipment. What the government records as "accidental deaths" grew by 50 per cent over the past decade.
"Every time I see incidents like AMRI I'm convinced we really are a third world nation with delusions of greatness," Omar Abdullah, the outspoken chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, said in the wake of the fire.