Another committee

The Sindh government has constituted yet another high-level committee, this time to "ensure the execution of the inquiry report" into the Gul Plaza inferno that claimed at least 80 lives in January. The committee, headed by the home minister, has been tasked with formulating a comprehensive implementation strategy, recommending corrective measures and ensuring coordination among relevant institutions. It will also monitor progress and regularly update the government. All well and good, except for the fact that all of this work can be skipped if the government simply accepts all of the recommendations of the judicial commission's report, or even the earlier Karachi Commissioner's report on the incident, which came out just a few days after the fire. It should not take three months for the government to recognise that locking emergency exits to reduce shoplifting or letting shopkeepers block them with merchandise are bad ideas. We can also safely assume that if Gul Plaza had a functional fire suppression system - rather than none - the fire could have been suppressed, or at least contained, before firefighters arrived on the scene. The actual building fell short of almost every safety-related feature in the building plan, regularised in 2003, including staircases that were too narrow. While the building had fire extinguishers, these are only effective against localised fires, which can be isolated from fuel sources. A blaze of the kind that engulfed the plaza would have required actual fire suppression systems - which were not there - and a better-equipped fire department. All of these problems were known to government authorities for several years, but for various reasons - all of them bad - no corrective actions were taken. Instead of debating the solutions, we could save everyone's time and money by taking straight yes-or-no decisions on all the recommendations from all the disasters over the past several years, since they are almost always the same.