India and Pakistan are united in spending citizen lives like pocket change

What the report says

Al Jazeera’s Vidya Krishnan argues that recent hospital fires in India and Pakistan highlight persistent failures in basic public safety, despite decades of state-building and military spending. The column centers on two deadly incidents this week: a fire at a government hospital in Amravati, in India’s Maharashtra state, where three newborns died in a neonatal intensive care unit, and a separate fire two days later at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad, where 14 newborns were killed in a maternity ward.

The article says the reported causes differed — a faulty ventilator in Amravati and an exploding air conditioner in Islamabad — but describes similar patterns in both cases: delayed rescue responses, difficulties evacuating patients, and official promises of inquiries, compensation and safety audits after the fact. It presents the deaths as part of a longer pattern of hospital fires linked to poor safety compliance and weak enforcement of building codes in both countries.

Krishnan places the latest tragedies in a wider historical context, citing earlier hospital fires in India and Pakistan that killed dozens of patients, including newborns, and arguing that repeated losses have rarely produced accountability. The piece also notes that the incidents occurred in politically and economically important places, not remote areas, which the author uses to underscore the point that the problem is not lack of resources but government priorities.

The column’s broader significance is its criticism of how India and Pakistan define national security. It contends that protecting citizens from preventable disasters like hospital fires should be treated as a basic responsibility, not a luxury, and that the repeated failure to ensure fire safety reveals how vulnerable patients and poor families are valued by both states.