Modern Society and the Bureaucratic Blind Spot in Industrial Safety

Modern Society and the Bureaucratic Blind Spot in Industrial Safety

Modern society is fundamentally an industrialized society. An industrial environment is one where dangers lurk in every nook and corner—often unnoticed by untrained individuals absorbed in their daily routines, until these dangers manifest catastrophically. Such a society demands a dedicated cadre of officials constantly working to protect citizens from these hidden and often unheard-of threats.

However, the critical issue is that the current model of bureaucracy in India—much like in many other countries—is ill-equipped to safeguard citizens from the unique dangers of an industrialized world. Today, the entire society effectively resides within an industrial setting. In essence, the nation can be imagined as a vast network of factories, yet both the bureaucracy and the general populace remain largely unaware of this defining characteristic of modern life.

Consider this analogy: imagine flying in an aircraft with your entire family—your spouse and three young children—while the fuel cut-off switch is suspected to be faulty, capable of switching on or off at random. Despite this, the maintenance engineers have filled their records, and the concern about the switch are not even known to the bureaucrats sitting in the top decision -making circles.

Now ask yourself: what would be your fate of you were to take flight in such an aircraft?

Now imagine again, living in the port city of Beirut, several kilometers away from the docks, and assuming you're safe from any danger originating from the port. And yet, a consignment of fertilizer—left in a warehouse years ago by a stranded ship—somehow ignites and causes a massive explosion. You and your family, though far from the blast site, become victims of what is later described as the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in recorded history. A blast second only to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is the scale of risk that modern industrial society carries. Tragically, the machinery of modern governance—particularly the bureaucracy, which acts as the government's eyes and ears—is often caught completely off-guard. Despite being supported by substantial public funding, this bureaucratic system frequently fails to detect or prevent such disasters.

To be clear, the bureaucracy is not entirely disconnected from these realities. However, its internal mechanisms for dealing with such events often rely heavily on informal networks—batchmates, personal contacts, and close confidants. A major obstacle in bureaucratic decision-making is the identification of the "gold standard"—the benchmark against which a situation must be assessed, analyzed, and judged. Civil servants typically rely on either their academic training or the insights of trusted colleagues to determine these standards. This overdependence on informal channels often hinders effective and timely action, especially in complex and rapidly evolving scenarios.

This issue represents a serious limitation in modern bureaucracy—one that may well be endangering public safety. Increasingly, I've observed that both political groups and the bureaucracies they support appear to view the enormous modern population as a burden—on the environment, on the economy, and even on governance itself. As a result, there's an unsettling shift toward treating human life as expendable.

This attitude is disturbingly evident in public discourse. When questioned about the poor condition of roads or the lack of safety in railways, political leaders and officials often respond with statements such as: "Such incidents are normal," "Nothing can be done to prevent them," or worse, "Those who were destined to die have died; let's not harm the living further by pursuing punishment."

These comments reflect a dangerous mindset—a belief that the sheer size of the population justifies a degree of indifference toward individual lives. The concern for public safety within the bureaucracy has fallen to abysmally low levels.

The problem is further compounded by the rise of global Industrial Safety Systems—such as ISO standards, the International Safety Management (ISM) Code used on merchant ships, and international organizations like WHO and ICAO. These bodies establish comprehensive performance standards in their respective domains, and they rely on systems such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), checklists, and structured manuals to adopt and implement them effectively.

This is another point where chokes have emerged in the arena of public safety responsibility. Many public officials have gradually developed a condescending view toward the operational heads within their teams. They have begun to believe that with the advent of SOPs, checklists, and catalogued operational manuals, the job of managing operations has become trivial. As a result, they've shifted their focus to other matters—restructuring, policymaking, publicity—while ignoring the rigorous enforcement and correct interpretation of operational procedures.

Modern organizations, both public and private, are increasingly obsessed with restructuring—merging, demerging, diversifying, borrowing, lending, selling, acquiring—doing everything except operating the systems they already have with precision and care. This behavior, I believe, is partly the result of a mindset that assumes operations are now a "solved" problem, thanks to SOPs and automation.

Even the private corporate sector has adopted and mirrored this mindset—a mindset that arguably began within the bureaucracy itself. In government, it is routine for a civil servant to move from a posting in agriculture to one in civil aviation, or from public health to municipal administration, without any sector-specific expertise. The private sector appears to have reasoned that if bureaucrats can be rotated so freely, then why shouldn't a marketing, sales, or HR professional be appointed as the head of operations?

Now think of the consequences of having non-core-specific persons in the role of operational heads, even with SOP and checklist systems in place. Each of these systems has its limitations, which have been cited innumerable times by critics. However, operational heads from non-core backgrounds may fail to appreciate or even recognize the applicability of these criticisms at the right moment and in the right context. As a result, they may be unable to judge the probability, severity, or immediacy of the consequences of their decisions. They may struggle to assess how strictly a procedure must be enforced in a given situation, or how strong a reasoning must be to justify decisive or preemptive action.

Checklist systems have always been criticized—even from the time of their origin—as having the potential to become little more than legal tissue paper: tools to wipe away the stains of negligence by those in positions of power. A non-core-specific person, unaware of such criticisms or of their appropriate application, may fail to recognize when a checklist is being used as a shield rather than a safeguard. This is the tricky part—where domain-specific knowledge becomes essential for making correct, often life-critical, judgments.

In a way, what many safety preachers have long been telling seafarers—not to become complacent with ISM checklists—has now ironically become an issue within the functions of those very preachers themselves.

Both the bureaucracy and the private corporates need to become alarmed by these accidents of such large-scale, sorrowful destruction and sit up and take notice of what wrong they may be doing. The much-talked-about problems faced by Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, are not isolated—they mirror the same structural failures that so many other corporations, and bureaucracies too, have come face-to-face with. And yet, in all these cases, those responsible continue to behave obliviously, refusing to acknowledge that the roots of these problems lie within their own systems and selves.