Fire at Jaipur’s Sawai Mansingh Hospital: From Jaipur to Jhansi, same disaster, same lack of accountability

The fragility of India’s public-hospital safety architecture was cast into sharp relief once again Sunday night when a fire broke out in the neurosurgery ICU of Jaipur’s Sawai Mansingh (SMS) Hospital, one of the largest government hospitals in Rajasthan. The blaze, reportedly triggered by a short circuit in an adjacent storage room, claimed the lives of at least six critically ill patients. Eyewitnesses and bereaved families speak of horrifying scenes of chaos: Malfunctioning alarms, absent fire extinguishers, locked emergency exits, overburdened staff ignoring early warning signs before abandoning patients and their desperate attendants in the pandemonium that followed. In an institution meant to offer care, this failure of basic infrastructure, preparedness and accountability reinforces