Indians seem to love the circus of a rescue more than saving people

livemint.com:

Narendra Modi. Among the receivers of the workers was Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami. The rescue had been a news drama for days.

What was not news was that India had, in very Indian ways, probably put the workers in danger. India has given us very little information about the cause of the tunnel collapse, which was probably caused by a landslide, exactly the sort of danger some people, including a panel appointed by the Supreme Court, had warned of. The tunnel is part of a highway project in a fragile section of the Himalayas, which is prone to landslides and flooding.

The project attracted environmental and safety concerns, which the government overcame through a ruse it has adopted to defeat activism. The New York Times reported, “The government had chopped up the project into 53 pieces, each under the 100-kilometer requirement for mandatory environmental impact assessments." The government also invoked national security, as the road is vital for military movements. We can say accidents do happen everywhere in the world, including places that assign a high value to life.

And there is a reasonable argument that environmentalists don’t like any infrastructural projects while people like to travel fast between two points, so governments across the world develop tricks to defeat them. But often, people die in India not because of some freak bad luck, but because India did not do enough for safety, especially of the poor. Some of the rescuers of the trapped construction workers themselves had jobs that do not exist in more compassionate societies.