What's happening to Hyderabad

Disasters, mostly man made appears to have clouded Hyderabad since the last few months. I have been living in Hyderabad since 1983, more than 24 years but I have never seen such incidents happening in such a short interval.

Many people comment that these kind of incidents are very rare in TDP regime and more common during congress regime. Most people seem to agree on this part but I don't have any statistics to conduct a t-test and see if this claim is statistically significant or not. On the other hand congress man claim that these things are not related to the regime and no one could have avoided them. Is this claim true? This claim definitely appears not to be true. What happened yesterday could have been easily avoided.

I had worked in a manufacturing form that used lot of flammable raw material. I have even done some work for a gas bottling plant too. At both these places safety is given highest proiority and despite that accidents do happen but the human casualty part is very very low. I had seen few accidents and in all these incidents human casualties are zero when sufficient awareness and supervision was employed to ensure safety was done. But in cases where safety practices were namesake and were done just for compliance there definitely were casualties. This clearly indicates a linkage between the attitude and results.

One thing is very clear, congress party and slack come together. Even during the last regime of congress there were so many unwanted incidents.

Another aspect that needs examination is the unpreparedness of the administrative machinery to address such incidents and their inability to handle media properly. Throughout the night news channels were claiming that there were more than 20 dead but after removing all the collapsed parts it was realized that there were only two who died. Media feeds on sensalisation and tries to push news in a way that allows them to gain maximum mileage. Almost all the channels now claim that they are fighting against corruption and keep uncovering incidents. On one hand this appears to be something good for people but on the other hand there is no attempt from media to do any root cause analysis. Why should they do it? They have no incentive to do that.

It is important that media be held responsible for their less responsible broadcasts and be fined for spreading rumors. There was another incident of firing yesterday. This happened at the residence of a congress leader's son. The person who got shot died at Apollo. Media for the want of sensation interview the deceased spoused and tried to put words in her mouth and then after that started repeatedly broadcasting the exact sentence that they would have wanted her to say.

It is important that media acts responsibly and play a neutral party and shouldn't take sides. In fact the politician is the PCC chief but still media shouldn't try to combine two uncorrelated events and blame one source for it. Any father in that situation would try to defend his son at the first instance and then later as a matured guy would state that law should take its own course. When we watch a movie, we would be more than ready to support a hero who murders the villain and expect that he gets released quickly so that he can get married to the heroine and when the villain is caught we almost always want him to be hanged. But in life one never knows who is the hero and who is the villain and sometimes a onetime hero would turn into a current villain. Move is only for two/three hours but life is forever.

Let me conclude this post by saying that one of the most important steps government must take is regulating who can be appointed as a reporter. Looks or voice should not be the deciding criteria but more important factors like maturity, sensibility, thorough knowledge about the domain and even law should be considered. Some kind of neutral certification is necessary if media has to be managed without clipping their wings or restricting their freedom of expression.