The sad truth is that no one comes well out of Monday’s appalling fire in Meerut in India. Police have arrested the organizers while the public has protested that the authorities failed to check site safety or provide adequate fire cover for the five-day event. When a procession of rival politicians came to visit some of the 110 injured in hospital, they were barracked by angry crowds, partly because police may have bull-dozed bodies away to hide the real death toll, which has been officially put at 34.

This was not only a disaster but also a disastrous mess. And unfortunately the impact of this tragedy will go further than the bereaved families, some of whom were even last night still searching for definite news of loved ones. India has already become a high-tech nation, having won for itself a leading place in international IT. The very exhibition that was housed in three large air-conditioned tents in Meerut was all about electronics and thus a vital part of India’s new modern image.

That a deadly fire could break out and take hold so quickly in an enclosed area with just a single way in and out is a disgrace. Normally such things would be expected only in the most backward countries that India is certainly not. This tragedy comes on top of last October’s floods in Bangalore which brought India’s undisputed IT hub to a grinding halt. How could a new Silicon City be built over a woefully inadequate drainage system and on the natural flood plain that had been concreted over? The horrors of Meerut may well cast some serious doubts upon basic Indian IT competence.

Such doubts are of course grossly unfair. Indian programmers and IT engineers rank with the world’s best. It is the rest of India around them, outside the IT cocoon, that needs to catch up. The authorities must be proactive, not reactive. The Meerut exhibition tent should never have been allowed with no emergency exits at all. There should have been immediate fire cover. And perhaps most telling, what the police are now treating as a potential crime scene, should not have become an open site for anyone to wander over, even as the last embers were still smoldering.

It could be argued that societies in which health and safety have become an important every-day consideration had to go through similar tragedies in order to reach their present levels. Such excuses have been made for the Chinese mining industry with its deplorable lack of enforced controls. Unfortunately this does not stand up in the IT age, since copious details of best practice in terms of health and safety are only a few keystrokes away on the Internet.

The senior judge now charged with inquiring into the Meerut blaze will surely pinpoint what seems to have been the inadequate state of mind among the authorities which contributed to this disaster. Assigning specific blame will be the least important part of his work. What are needed are lessons that are going to be learned swiftly and improvements just as swiftly implemented.