Hauz Rani Fire: The Cook Is the Fall Guy

The Economic Survey of Delhi 2018-19 had found that a third of Delhi residents lived in informal or sub-standard settlements. While many equate informal housing with slums, it is pertinent to explain that not all informal settlements are slums. Informal living also includes living in that extra room of the house that was not meant to exist in the eyes of the law or a house built on land that is not part of the municipal records or living in any form of tenement that is invisible in the eyes of the state. Paying-guest accommodations in narrow alleys, rooms built on terraces, buildings stretched to four floors on a plot of 100 yards, where no more than one floor was permissible, are all instances of informal living. 

Someone that should not exist legally but exists in flesh and blood is the reality of 250 million Indians, if not more. Without resolving this conundrum, any clamour for change or any promise by the state – in the backdrop of the recent fire in a B&B in Delhi’s Hauz Rani that claimed 23 lives – will be a lost cause. 

Illusion of control

To assuage the masses that things are under control and to demonstrate a semblance of law and order, the cook of the B&B was swiftly arrested and charged for negligence that caused the fire. 

The working theory is that the state genuinely believes in the culpability of this cook. If that is the case, then the illusive magic wand has indeed been found for all that ails Delhi. It is now merely a matter of deploying digital-India surveillance tools to trace all such cooks, security guards and maids employed in such establishments and put them behind bars to restore the safety of our neighbourhoods. 

The B&B that caught fire in Hauz Rani had permission, granted by the tourism department of Delhi, to run six rooms. It built more than 20. This happened in a zone called Lal-Dora, which is beyond the urban planning purview of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi for its building-plans. Therefore, it didn’t matter to the state that the B&B was a stuffed cluster without fire-exits, harvesting lodging demand for medical tourism in the vicinity. 

The license granted to this B&B was to run no more than a tea-stall within it, but it installed a full-fledged commercial kitchen instead. The premises were audited by a fire department a couple of years ago and green-lighted till 2027. This meant a certificate of compliance after a physical verification by a state representative . 

The question to ask is that if the existence of the building itself is inconceivable because it does not come under any urban planning norms, why did the other organs of the state – fire-services, municipal services like water and electricity and the tourism department – extend their largess to it? In other words, the B&B was invisible to one organ of the state but was a visible and a viable entity to the other organs of the same state. 

Indictment of the state

The cook's arrest is born from the compulsion of the state to hide it's inability to curb informal housing because every such incident indicts the state on three counts.

First, the model of urban governance sits at odds with the demands and needs of Indian cities. Take the case of the new B&B policy of Delhi’s tourism department that was introduced by the Delhi government in 2026.

The Hauz Rani fire is proof that this policy was at odds with the ability of the MCD to implement it. What was the deliberation between the Delhi government and the MCD on this discrepancy? Were there any dissent notes and push-back by the municipal corporation against the state? 

Delhi’s case is extreme in that the city and the state are co-joint twins but in other states too, this duality exists in most cases of urban governance that concern sanitation, housing, utility services, urban planning. 

Perhaps the time has come to take a call for mega-metros, mini-metros and capital cities of Indian states to pilot a different form of urban governance on the lines of Shanghai, New York, London, Manilla, where only one of the two may exist between super-mayors or the chief ministers and the mayors of these cities when it comes to taking a call on a B&B’s right to exist. 

Second, the capacity of local governance to govern the complex requirements and dynamic nature of Indian cities is gravely inadequate. The city of Delhi has 71 fire stations for its more than 30 million citizens or roughly one station for nearly 5 lakh people. 

The city faces an acute shortfall of more than 10,000 people in these fire-stations  and not to mention in equipment like water tenders, ladders, quick response vehicles etc. Between the human and the equipment shortfall, the installed capacity of the fire-department of this mega-metro is expected to undertake audits, issue fire safety certificates, conduct periodic training, campaigns and fire safety drills and respond to crisis calls.

Therefore, in the case of B&B fire, instead of seeing corruption as the sole reason for the B&B to secure a fire safety certificate, we need to spare a thought to the severe anaemia that grips the fire-safety department and its inability to visit the premises for a site-visit. 

In the post-liberal world order, privatisation is often seen as a panacea for routine matters like fire-safety like audits and training. Here again the question becomes that if the government has the funds to hire a private contractor for tasks of local governance, why can’t it use these funds to ramp up its own capacity and demonstrate a superior model of state-owned and state-run governance? 

The anaemia of local governance is a political question too. How many people think about the fact that in the case of an emergency, the fire station in the neighborhood does not have enough fire-fighters to save them from the inferno and that in the next election this will be an issue on which they will take the government to task? Fire tragedies, after a few days of hyperbole, become individual sorrows to be lived by a few hundreds or thousands in isolation and away from public glare, unlike the mass angst against non-vegetarian food sold during Hindu festivals.

Third, is the issue of urban planning and the template that India pursues to build its cities. Every fact-finding report by the fire-department of Delhi for all major and minor fire incidents in the city puts one or all the following reasons: high density, narrow lanes, electrical overloading, unauthorised colonies. 

Shouldn't the urban planning approach be put under the scanner? How is it possible that the national capital has created subaltern living to such an extent that emergency public services can’t reach them in their time of need?

Indian cities, viewed from the lens of equality, justice and environment are feudal in design. They put the most burden on the most marginalised and this injustice surfaces occasionally during tragedies. Urban planning in Indian cities is viewed from the lens of those with agency to govern these cities. They treat them as a playground to monetize every inch of the city’s space with vanity projects they saw on their last visit to a first world city somewhere. 

For this reason, public spaces like parks, libraries, playgrounds, mangroves, wetlands, have disappeared and made way for motorways that reward private cars that are owned by less than ten percent of Indian households. For this reason, 50 of the top hottest cities in the world happened to be in India. For this reason, formal affordable housing as an urban planning response has disappeared from the public discourse, while authorities bulldoze slums with impunity and without clean alternatives. Indian urban planners design cities that rewards the fortunate few and crowds out the rest. 

Modern cities are a post-colonial reality of India and one that India does not have the wherewithal to deal with. There is no single culprit here but a systemic failure of a people’s government that is designed to work for them but fails to do so. This sits at the heart of the issue and what better way to hide it than to arrest the poor cook as the fall-guy? 

Ankur Bisen is a Senior Partner at  The Knowledge Company, and the author of ‘Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change’ (Pan Macmillan; 2019). The author is on X: @AnkurBisen1

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.