#dnaEdit: Tragedy that repeats

The blowout on the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) pipeline at Nagaram village in East Godavari district that killed 19 people and left many with critical burn injuries is a wake-up call to the authorities. With India embarking on several oil and gas drilling ventures, ensuring public safety is a responsibility that public and private companies cannot afford to shirk. The toll, human and financial, from the Nagaram blowout could have been several-fold worse had the flames leapt onto the nearby Tatipaka ONGC mini-refinery. With preliminary findings reportedly indicating that the pipeline had corroded and was this year’s fourth reported instance, GAIL cannot afford to dilute its liability by dubbing the blowout as an accident.

Though the gas transporter has suspended two senior executives, the imperative for strict action that will best serve as a deterrent lies with law enforcement officials. If proven that GAIL executives ignored alerts of the corrosion, the stringent Section 304(II) of the Indian Penal Code rather than IPC Section 304A must kick in. The former — culpable homicide not amounting to murder for acts done “with the knowledge that it is likely to cause death, but without any intention to cause death” — prescribes 10 years imprisonment for wrongdoers. Unfortunately, the tragic precedent of the Bhopal gas tragedy where the accused were convicted under the lighter IPC Section 304A (causing death by negligence) carrying a maximum punishment of just two years and is bailable, continues to be preferred. Without fixing punitive liability on top management, the lax security standards that dog many industries will not change.

In Nagaram, the corrosion and the resultant leak was allegedly caused by condensate and water having high sulphur content present in the gas supplied to GAIL by ONGC. GAIL was responsible for removing the condensate and water according to contractual stipulations. GAIL’s response to the earlier reported leaks — handing the annual maintenance contract to a private contractor — offers another dimension to the industrial safety issue. With slowdowns, cost-cutting, and companies increasingly conscious of bottom-lines and expenditure that reduces profits, vital operational aspects are being left to contracted or temporary workforce wanting in skills or the incentive to diligently perform these tasks. This is despite a widely-cited 2005 International Labour Organisation report pegging Indian fatalities from industrial accidents at 40,000 every year. To buttress its point on underreporting, ILO noted that the Czech Republic, with a fraction of India’s population, reported 231 accidents while India reported only 222 fatal accidents.

The Nagaram incident has happened at a time when a proposed independent safety regulator for the petroleum and natural gas industry floundered amid the multiple controversies regarding gas pricing that beset the sector. Arming it with adequate powers to penalise and make binding its strictures and recommendations assumes importance considering the expansion plans and new pipelines that the ONGC and GAIL have envisaged. In the gas-rich Krishna-Godavari basin having several pipelines supplying gas to power and fertilizer plants, the incident is bound to agitate the local population. Such was the loss of life and property and the intensity of the blast that seared Nagaram. The protests by Kudankulam residents against the nuclear plant in their vicinity despite repeated assurances by the plant operator stem from suspicions that the culture of disregard for public safety is the norm rather than the exception. In the long run, fixing stringent liability and firming up safety standards will only serve the Indian industry better.