Accidents - Compensation - Class bias -Legal ethics etc.

One of my Guindy Eginnering batch mates had written as below towards the end of a longer mail that he posted  regarding issues connected with Bhopal tragedy and accidents in general. He had also questioned the need for giving compensation to accident victims (of rail / air / bus whatever) out of taxpayers’ money. I felt compelled to respond and the response is after the passage quoted.

Quote

It my considered view that (sic) the root cause for all these “ERRORS “  is the policy of reservations. If you give admissions / appoint persons on the basis of their birth how will you get merit personnel in decisions making positions ? (sic). An engineer coming through merits would have been more conscious to attend leakage than one who has got the post / degree by the birth qualifications. Intelligent / brainy people have to be encouraged  so that they will CONTRIBUTE . Merit needs to be recognized..

Unquote

My response

While there are some valid points in SK's communication, he is going overboard and also mixes up issues. Intelligence / competence and integrity / social consciousness are not necessarily always co-existent. Anti-social crooks are very intelligent / competent too. I do not think we have enough statistical evidence to show that more accidents have been caused by the negligence / incompetence of employees of particular communities, for SK to make statements of the kind he has made towards the end. 

Yes, all deaths can be considered as "accidents"; so can be murders committed on impulse. So do we let murderers free? That is why we have different degrees of the crime - pre-meditated, cold blooded murder at one end and culpable manslaughter due to negligence on the other end. The punishments differ too.

   

It is true that industrial accidents are largely the result of collective failure rather than - in exceptional cases - attributable to a specific individual. However, it is also true that suppliers of equipment are not averse to hiding the shortcoming of their equipment, especially when dealing with corrupt third world economies. Many hazardous industries being shifted to "emerging" economies; or drugs banned in the parent country being peddled in third world countries  are examples of callous attitudes of large corporations. If we go by the dictum "buyer beware" for all such transactions too, we might as well accept anarchy. We then, don't have the moral right to criticize Maoists'  violence or for that matter should not cry of "exploitation" by auto drivers of Chennai!! 

Remember corruption, black market etc. involve two players and both are equally guilty. In fact one can even argue that corruption was instituted by myopia of some business without realising the long term implication. Now, the most affected are the poor. See Sainath's article in the link below:

http://bit.ly/dj4DET

Of course, I agree that attempt to punish Anderson is just symbolic and is a waste of time and effort. Focus must be to get relief for the real victims and efforts to prevent man-made catastrophes in future.