A month back, when I still had Asianet connection at home, I saw the sad visual of  18 young boys and girls who died while boating in Thattekkad. They had gone for a picnic, with their teachers and their boat drowned in the lake, killing 18 of them. Three teachers died too. The visual of the dead bodies of young children were sad enough, but that was not all. There was the scenes from the homes of these young children. Fathers and mothers who sent their children for a school picnic and was waiting to take them home and hear their stories, suddenly faced with the news that they are not going to come back.

A day later, we started seeing the shocking images of the “boat” in which they were taken for the trip. This was not really a “pleasure trip boat” as you would have expected. Two small boats which could carry upto 5 people safely were tied together with some sort of platform on the top and if reports are correct, upto 40 children and teachers climbed onto it and only half of them returned. Obviously there was no life jacket, no radio communication, no life guard and nothing which would have prevented the gravity of the event when it happened. Additional information provided indicated that the boat had no license to operate and driver had no training. It was just a disaster waiting to happen and it did.

A day later we also saw another scene. The entire Cabinet of the state came to the village and as the dead bodies awaited burial, they met in the school room officially and made proclamations of grief, of compensation, of outrage and inquiry.

In days which followed, boat owners across the state were chased by virtually everybody who had some administrative control over them. This included officials from the police, officials from the transport department, officials from the tourism department and so on. Armed with the strong public opinion, boat rides in many tourist locations were stopped and number of boats taken into custody (sure, is the boat which is the problem, not the people as you would have thought).

One month from then, we don’t hear about the arrest of boats or actions on boat safety anymore. Boat rides are back so are the drivers (without training) and boats (without licence). It is a rule of statistics that the next major accident will not be in boating.

Sure, it was not.

Last week, a shop selling fire work crackers caught fire and exploded in Calicut, killing 8 people and injuring many more. The explosion happened in the early hours of the business which resulted in the low casualty but it could have been much more if the incident happened in the afternoon or evening. By then I had given up on the Asia net, so I did not have to see the images, which I am sure would have been horrific and saddening. But I did read stories of young boys who just started working in these shops during their summer holidays to supplement their family income. That made me sad.

In this case, there was not much of an evidence left. With the fire, explosion and the rescue effort, the shop where it all started had ceased to exist. The owner of the shop was dead. This of course left lot of room for speculation from illegal storage of high grade explosive to deliberate causing of explosion.

But the third part of the circus did happen. The entire cabinet, or at least most of it, came to the site and went around, make proclamations of grief, compensation, outrage and inquiry. Without waiting for any forensic experts, they also alleged conspiracy in the whole incident.

As sure as day follow the night, the entire state machinery was after fire cracker shops since. Across the state, shops are being raided and findings of storage of explosive without licence, explosive beyond the limit of the licence and so on are being found out and exposed. Explosives are being taken to custody (sure !). I think this festive season will have to quieter without crackers.

But two things we can be sure about.

1.                  By next festive season, the cracker shops will be back

2.                  Before that, there will be yet another tragedy, which statically will neither be on the boat nor in cracker shop. But that is not because these sectors have learnt any lessons. There are other disasters waiting to happen to these sectors will have to wait on the back of the queue.

I can think of at least one hundred possibilities which can lead to multiple casualities in Kerala any day. I will not even count traffic accidents in them because it is so common that Malayalees seems to have factored that into their daily life. Here is a sample,

1.                  An electric line passing over a temple pond falls down and electrocute people taking bath in those ponds

2.                  A truck carrying petrol hits an electric post, catch fire and explode in the middle of the town, killing 100 people

3.                  A thunderstorm cause the roof of a school to collapse killing those children

4.                  A landslide caused by the removal of soil from one of the hills buries an entire village downhill

5.                  A factory storing benzene catch fire and explodes killing workers

As a trained HSE personal, I can go on and on with possible scenarios. I can also predict what will happen if any of these things happen;

1.                  The entire public attention is focussed on that event and the individual/organisaton who caused it is vilified

2.                  Government announce outrage and orders inquiry

3.                  Government machinery go after that specific issue for next one month

4.                  All is forgotten, life goes on

This is the biggest tragedy of all. We learn nothing from these tragedies and solve nothing for our children. So they are exposed to ever increasing possibilities of tragic deaths.

But the fact is that people are dying and most of these are preventable death. I was doing a presentation last year and collected information on the number of people dying in kerala from traffic accidents and I compared that with teh number of people getting killed in Kashmir by terrorists. Guess what ?. We kill more people on the road than they do up in the hill. There are thousand of soldiers in kashmir to protect our people and on our street, there is no body to protect us. It is free for all. This is sad.

There are three important things about safety which we should understand if we have to get sustained results.

1.                  Safety is an attitude which has to be planted and nurtured. You cannot achieve sustainable safety standards within a culture of permissivity.

2.                  Safety cost money. You cannot both have cheap goods and services and good safety.

3.                  Safety needs comprehensive and sustained effort. You can’t fix it sector by sector, you cant fix it in fits and starts

If Kerala were to achieve a sustainable safety standard, we have start planting and nurturing a safety culture within ourselves and especially our children. We should train ourselves and our children to look at the safety risk associated with EVERYTHING we do to such a degree that it becomes integral to our whole thought process, something we do subconsciously without being prompted.

• This would mean that we will no loger be able to get driving licence without learning to drive


• This for example would mean that we may no longer stand on the foot board of a bus


• This would mean that we will no longer driver after we had alcohol


• This would mean that we will no longer use a high current appliance on a low current socket


• This would mean that we will no longer get into a boat which has no safety jacket available


• This would mean that we will demand that the driver of every bus displays the number of accidents he has caused his career


• This would mean that we will no longer subject our elephant to the high decibel noise of our music instrument and fire works


• This will mean that we will no longer fix the fuse in our house with copper wire


• And so on…

As you can see, this would alter fundamentally the way we live. This may also cost money, but safety is not cheap.

Incidents such as the tragedies described earlier are occasions for us to start thinking of safety more seriously. Government can also help to create this awareness. Here is a simple suggestion.

I was travelling in Serbia and along the road, I saw a small patch (1 m X 1 m) flower plants from time to time. I asked my interpreter “what is it ?’ and she said “you know this started during the war, when some soldier died at a spot, others did not have the chance to take their body back to the family. So they buried them there itself and planted flower plants on top. Later on their family came their every year in memory and tended to those flowers”. “However, these days, these patches are created by people whose close family members died in a road accident along this road and the family comes once every year and pray for them”.

Now imagine if we had this tradition. Kerala will instantly turn out to be a garden. Some patches in particular will need multiple layers to accommodate for all the dead.