A city on the brink, Agra now teeters on the edge of a disaster. The spectre of Bhopal's tragic legacy looms large, as the city's industrial landscape, marked by lax safety standards and regulatory apathy, poses a grave threat to its residents.

Despite the harrowing lessons of the past, Agra's industries continue to operate with impunity, their disregard for safety protocols a recipe for catastrophe. The city's homes and businesses are perilously close to hazardous facilities, yet authorities turn a blind eye, prioritizing profit over human life.

Read in Hindi: लापरवाही का आलम, हर मोहल्ले में बसा है ‘भोपाल’

Regulatory agencies, meant to safeguard the public, are mired in bureaucratic inefficiency. Inspections are infrequent and superficial, and enforcement is lax. This systemic failure has fostered a culture of indifference, where the potential for disaster is overshadowed by economic considerations.

One would expect that history would serve as a formidable teacher, imparting lessons etched in tragedy. However, Agra stands as a stark reminder that the echoes of past calamities resonate in vain amidst the misguided complacency of regulatory bodies, industries, and community organizations.

Despite the harrowing reminder of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, where thousands lost their lives and countless others suffered from its aftermath, Agra's inhabitants remain precariously perched on a powder keg of industrial negligence. The toxic cocktail of inadequate safety measures and lackadaisical enforcement is an explosive formula for disaster. Locality after locality, homes and businesses are situated alarmingly close to factories that handle hazardous materials. Yet, these establishments operate with impunity, their safety protocols often reduced to mere checkboxes on a bureaucratic form.

Regulatory agencies, whose mandate is to ensure citizens' safety, seem trapped in a cycle of neglect. Inspections are infrequent, and when they occur, they often yield superficial compliance rather than genuine accountability. The very nature of their oversight is a glaring testament to the systemic failures that plague our safety environment. The absence of rigorous enforcement creates a culture of indifference, where the potential for disaster is overshadowed by the allure of profit margins and productivity.

Industry players, motivated primarily by economic gain, exhibit a blatant disregard for the human cost of their operations. Emergency procedures collect dust, and last-minute safety drills are perfunctory, and not proactive. The threat of catastrophic incidents is trivialized, fostering a dangerous mentality prioritising operational efficiency over human life.

In a region so reminiscent of a disaster waiting to unfold, it is unconscionable that the lessons of Bhopal have failed to penetrate the collective psyche. Agra's denial of the inherent risks surrounding its communities not only jeopardizes the well-being of its residents but also signals a grievous failure to honour the memories of those lost.

Environmentalist Devashish Bhattacharya said that given the callousness of civic authorities, disasters were only waiting to happen in urban clusters across the country.

The Bhopal gas tragedy, one of the world’s worst industrial disasters which killed over 3,500 people in a single night and left an estimated 25,000 maimed, occurred on December 3, 1984.

Social activists say no-objection certificates were issued to builders without the mandatory checks, putting lives at risk. The health department of the Agra Municipal Corporation, for instance, was least concerned about how garbage and sewerage were disposed of. The situation in the Taj city was alarming as sewage was being directly pumped into the earth through borewells. Any day there could be an explosion, as methane and other noxious gases were being produced. The city is perched on explosives, as it were. 

In fact, there is a Bhopal in every locality, in the form of illegal godowns, factories, workshops, choked sewer lines emitting toxic gases, cold storage, and oil mills with steam boilers. Government agencies entrusted with the task of regular monitoring and inspecting show no urgency or seriousness, with the result there is a major fire outbreak almost every month in Agra in some residential areas or other.

The Petha industry, the shoe factories, and hundreds of illegal manufacturing units in colonies not only add to the pollution level but pose a hazard to the safety of life.

The attitude of carelessness begins right from home, from the kitchen and bathrooms. People are neither careful about gas cylinder pipelines nor about electrical fittings which often lead to short-circuiting, says homemaker Padmini Iyer. "Often fire protection units or extinguishers failed to work, and the lifts in the high-rise buildings were not periodically tested for safety," she added."

So many deaths have occurred due to failure to follow the rules books. Cases of gas leaks from cold storages, boiler blasts, hazardous effluents being discharged in community water resources without treatment, gutter cleaning mishaps, etc., have resulted in the loss of life and property.