The Lucknow and Delhi fires are not isolated disasters but symptoms of a deeper governance failure, turning negligence into a national hazard

Fourteen young people, most of them students and staff at a coaching-cum-gaming centre in Lucknow’s Aliganj, died on June 22 when fire tore through the building they were working in. The visuals were chillingly familiar: panicked youngsters jumping from windows, fire tenders struggling through narrow lanes, a chief minister cutting short his tour to visit the dead. It had happened before — barely three weeks earlier, in Delhi, where 21 people, many of them foreign nationals who had come to the city seeking medical treatment, burned to death in a guesthouse with no valid fire safety certificate. Two cities, two tragedies, one unchanged answer to the question of why: India has still not learned to keep its........

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