When a bridge falls

The Delhi Metro, till yesterday held up a shining example of India's engineering capabilities, is a shameful failure today. A part of the bridge on which the train runs has collapsed. The accident has killed six, and injured 40.

E Sreedharan, who steered the project to success, announced he was quitting within an hour of the bridge collapse, but such is the faith in his incorruptibility that Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit has rejected his resignation.

Sreedharan is a hero: he built the Delhi Metro and the Konkan Railway in record time. He brought accountability to government projects, he took pride in his work, and he wasn’t interested in the pickings. But look how his good work now lies in ruins.

It is possible bridge strength tests were done casually. It is possible contractors were up to their usual game of cutting costs once they had the contract in their pockets. It is possible an engineer overlooked a critical lapse, either out of laziness or because he was pleased by the contractor’s generosity.

In the case of the Delhi Metro, the man at the helm made a huge difference, but someone somewhere cheated, and ruined it all. Which brings us back to an old lament: Indians lack a culture of excellence. What we do we do half-heartedly, and with an eye on how much we can pocket. And that bad national karma returns to haunt us every now and then.

As soon as news of the accident broke, our reporter Chetan went around the Namma Metro site in Bangalore, and was startled to find an expert worrying about the safety of its alignment.

India may produce the world's largest number of engineers, but we are incapable of planning any public service well. Our bus stands, railway stations and airports are usually a mess, and we get by without thinking too much about the misery until something terrible happens, and people are dead. We then make noises of sympathy and outrage, and end up saying it should all be handed over to the private sector.

In January, some of us from MiD DAY happened to be at the site of a bridge collapse near Hampi. As we watched, the rescue team reported a breakthrough, some 40 hours after the suspension bridge had crashed.

Policemen in coracles pulled the first body by its hair, and rowed to the bank. We heard a touching story: the men who had first sprung to the construction workers’ rescue were boatmen who had been protesting the construction of the bridge as it would rob them of their livelihood. But we also saw complete disregard for the lives of rescue workers. A wide 70-foot-high pillar was cracked at the bottom, and looked like it could collapse any which way, but no rescue worker was wearing a helmet or safety gear.

To this day, we don’t know who was responsible for that collapse. We read about tourism minister Janardhan Reddy and his brothers, who rule the region, donating a crown worth millions to a temple, but we haven’t heard a thing from them about a tragedy that killed at least seven poor workers, and flushed crores of our tax money down the drain.