Local government has miserably failed to maintain an effective fire brigade system. The municipal committees and Corporations throughout the country have to, perforce, call fire brigades of either cantonment boards or Armed forces to put out fire because their own fire brigades are ill equipped with the necessary fire extinguishing equipment and water and the staff employed by them to extinguish fire is inefficient not up to the job.
The net result is that property worth billions of rupees gets gutted every year and many invaluable lives too are burnt to death. It is about time the local bodies revisited their present fire brigade system and design it on the pattern of the one operative in the US.
In the same manner in the private sector before issuance of NOCs allowing construction of multi-storied plazas and factories the competent authority must satisfy itself whether the owners of their buildings have made adequate arrangements to extinguish fire in case it breaks out and are they in a position to extricate the persons trapped by fire inside the buildings.
The corrective steps taken by the government to put the country’s economy back on the rails are now paying off and finance minister has rightly said that every person in the country will have to contribute to the country’s exchequer by paying his due taxes over which there is going to be no compromise.
POSTSCRIPT: Pope Francis has hit the right nail in the head by demanding a probe at the international level into what he described as genocide of Palestinians by Israel. The UN shouldn’t take lightly his demand if it will dilly dally in the matter its credibility which is already very low among the developing countries will touch its nadir and before long it will suffer the same fate which was destiny of the League of Nations.
