Dufferin fire: probe report handed to government, blame still unclear

A fire broke out in the newborn intensive care unit, or SNCU, at Amravati district women's hospital in the early hours of August 24 after a ventilator exploded. The state-level committee formed to investigate the incident has now submitted its report to the government. The committee handed the report to the health department secretary in Mumbai on Monday evening. But what the report contains has not yet come out. Why the fire broke out, where the lapses occurred and who is responsible for them remain unanswered questions.

After the incident, health minister Prakash Abitkar had rushed to Amravati and set up the state-level inquiry committee. He had promised a report within seven days. Guardian minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule then visited Amravati a week after the incident and announced that the inquiry report would be submitted to the government and made public on September 1 itself. But in reality it took until September 7 for the report to reach the health secretary, and it has still not been made public.

Meanwhile, on the day the fire broke out, it had come to light that the hospital's fire safety system was not working. Notably, the system that should have switched on automatically was set to manual mode. Besides this, serious questions were also raised about a suspected technical fault in the power supply, how effective the firefighting system was, and the fact that a fire audit had been pending for a long time.

The inquiry also found that despite repeated letters from the Dufferin hospital administration, the electricity department did not complete the fire audit process within the stipulated time. Because of this, the safety arrangements in place before the fire, the condition of the electrical system, the delay in the fire audit and the maintenance of equipment installed in the SNCU all remained under the committee's scrutiny.

Sources say all these matters have been included in the inquiry report. Exactly which lapses the committee has pointed to, which officers or staff it has held responsible, and what it has identified as the real cause of the accident will only become clear once the report is made public. The inquiry report may have reached the government, but the truth is still behind the curtain. The people of Amravati are now watching to see when the government makes the report public and who faces action after that.