DailyPost 2243
MORBI
The first response to a search of this name, throws up Morbi tragedy. The image of broken and hanging bridge taking away 135 lives has become the defining image of the city for all times to come. This has not been of their making and dear departed had not idea as to what they stepping onto, on that fateful Sunday evening. Horror is manufactured in movies, here it is in the theatre of life, in a manner no one could have ever imagined. Unlike the movies, here the horror is there to stay. There are reams and reams written about it and also kilometers of footages would be stored of the great debates which have been held on this topic. The playbook of tragedies have long been informally created and perfected.
The tragedy that life goes on as usual for all but for the families who have lost their near and dear ones and then ones lost out of life because of a meticulously designed broken system to subserve anything but what the democracy is designed to deliver. Why things don’t get right or cannot be set right? The commissions and reports have become endemic and nothing much changes but few privileged getting employed one again to do job, the result of which will never get implement. That is if comes out with something worthwhile. The IIMs and IIPAs don’t do case studies on any or the whole gamut of a genre of these incidents.
To treat them as accidents and leave it to the fate of a single criminal investigation can only bring us to where we reached. At the very best few would be nailed and process itself would become the punishment to the aggrieved and not the accused. In other cases, real accused would not even be nailed and rare few might not find a mention in the FIR. How many influential persons name in FIRs have been ruling the roost for decades or all their life. The deliberately broken system has to unraveled layer after layer, persona after persona and system after system. And how all these finally get enmeshed and neatly calibrated into an operational Black Box, which nobody with even the best of the intentions have not been able to crack.
Is enquiry, investigation, research et al have lost touch with the Indian reality. To each to his own is the story and they do whatever they mandate. How do even try and understand this broken system? Is Morbi is business case study in the manner business was conducted? The Business Schools might not feel so. They have their own world and live successfully in that. Don’t we need a Governance Case Study on Morbi, or if something of that nature even exists. This and of other broken systems, an intensive study is a dire need of the nation, with Morbi at its centre; a project management case study, a business values & integrity case study, a criminal investigation case study, an accountability case study, a politics case study, a mass media case study, and a sarkari largesse case study to name a few. Why academicians don’t reach even the periphery of human life and research it seems is meant for other planets. Finally, can’t academicians, researchers and well-meaning practitioners come together to a create a meaningful India.
MORBI IS THE RESULT OF A WELL DESIGNED MULTIFACETED BROKEN SYSTEM.
Sanjay Sahay