The Sky Is Not to Blame: On Tragedy, Progress, and Responsibility

June 2025 

The tragedy that unfolded recently on the tarmac of Ahmedabad, with the death of 260 souls aboard a Dreamliner, ought not be merely registered as a statistical aberration, nor left to the rituals of mourning and bureaucratic inquiry. It demands, rather, that we ask what such moments reveal about the deeper structure of our society, its ambitions, its institutions, its sense of responsibility.

In the aftermath of such disasters, emotion naturally overpowers analysis. But even in the face of grief, one cannot remain immune to the disquieting symmetry between a rising power and its faltering systems. India, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, aspires to play on the stage of great nations. And yet, as the Hotmail founder Shabeer Bhatia dared to suggest, provoking a storm of accusations and misplaced nationalist fury, there is an unresolved contradiction between grandeur of ambition and the often-unglamorous necessity of institutional excellence.

It is probably a feature of developing societies that criticism is most unwelcome when most required. One is accused of betrayal, of echoing the voice of colonial disdain, when one speaks not as a cynic but as a disappointed patriot. And yet, history instructs us that no nation achieves greatness by suppressing its dissenters. It is through critical thought, humble inquiry, and healthy doubt that progress advances not through comfort, arrogance, or dogmatic certainty. It is forged not in the public spectacle of pride, but in the private refusal to accept mediocrity.

The crash was not merely the failure of a machine or the error of a man. It was, more profoundly, a failure, actual or latent, of systems: of oversight, of maintenance, of that invisible architecture upon which the edifice of safety rests. Perhaps the fault lies in the aircraft itself, perhaps in a rare confluence of anomalies. But the more urgent question is this: does India possess the institutional maturity, the independence, the technical rigour, to investigate, analyse, and isolate the root cause without fear or favour?

We may, out of deference to grief, postpone such inquiries until the rituals of mourning are complete. But to delay too long is to risk that most familiar of national habits: forgetting. Memory, after all, is ephemeral. Structures endure. And if the structure remains unsound, if the conditions that bred tragedy are left undisturbed, then tragedy will not remain a stranger. It will return.

Let us consider the data, as one must when feeling alone does not suffice. Aviation, globally, has become remarkably safe. From 2011 to 2015, the fatal accident rate stood at 2.20 per million flights. By the early 2020s, it had fallen to 1.25. These are not mere numbers; they are evidence of what concerted policy, technological evolution, and relentless scrutiny can achieve. The miracle of modern air travel rests not in its speed or spectacle, but in its safety.

But aggregate progress obscures unevenness. Developed nations, those with mature institutions and regulatory depth, boast fatality rates as low as 1 in 80 million flights. India, by contrast, hovers at 1 in 58.8 million, 36% higher. This places it on the cusp between what aviation analysts term “Tier 2” and “Tier 3”: the latter being a domain where infrastructure is patchy, regulators overstretched, and systems more aspirational than assured.

This is not to castigate. It is to diagnose. And diagnosis, if done with sincerity, is the precondition for cure.

There is, in the soul of every modernising society, a temptation to leap, to leap from tradition to modernity, from poverty to prosperity, from obscurity to prominence. But the laws of progress are not those of alchemy. They are those of patience, planning, and institutional seriousness. A nation cannot build air corridors while neglecting airworthiness. It cannot aspire to Mars while overlooking the checklists on Earth.

In the end, it may be that Shabeer Bhatia’s words stung not because they were unjust, but because they were untimely. Yet,words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking. Perhaps in moments such as these, a little wildness is precisely what we need. Behind the sorrow of each accident lies a silent warning. And it is the duty of a serious nation not merely to grieve, but to listen.

So, what precisely do we mean when we speak of systemic failure?

It is not, as the casual observer might assume, a faulty bolt or a lapse of concentration. It is not the rogue variable in an otherwise sound equation. Rather, systemic failure occurs when the equation itself is flawed, when the system’s architecture, its feedback loops, its hierarchies of responsibility, and its internal redundancies all prove unequal to the demands placed upon them. It is the failure not of a node, but of the network. It is the slow, accretive negligence that evades accountability because it belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.

In the case of the crash of Air India Flight 171, the outlines of such a failure may already be taking shape, though we must, of course, await the conclusions of those entrusted with the official inquiry. Nonetheless, the emergence of multiple plausible theories reminds us that in aviation, as in economics, catastrophe is rarely monocausal. It is born, more often, of confluence.

From Tragedy to Accountability

It is here that Shabeer Bhatia’s contentious observation takes on its true weight, not as a provocation, but as a challenge to national self-regard. “Should the world’s fourth-largest economy still be suffering plane crashes due to systemic failures?” he asked. And though the public reaction was swift and unforgiving, the question remains uncomfortably valid.

Indeed, the statistics are sobering. India's aviation fatality risk, according to recent analyses, is 36% higher than that of Tier 1 nations. This is not a technical curiosity, it is a policy failure. One might inquire whether the cause lies in an aging fleet, in chronic underinvestment, in an overburdened regulator, or in a bureaucratic culture that confuses form with function. Likely, it is a combination of all four.

But here again, the point is not recrimination. It is responsibility.

For if a nation is to claim its place on the world stage, it must match its economic ambition with institutional integrity. Growth cannot be an alibi for fragility. Nor can pride substitute for scrutiny. The price of modernity is not merely a rising GDP; it is the unseen infrastructure of competence, discipline, and foresight.

Until those become the norm rather than the aspiration, every such crash will be more than an isolated tragedy. It will be a warning, quietly issued from the wreckage, that systems unattended do not quietly endure. They decay. And when they decay, they fail, suddenly, and at great cost.

Air India and the Legitimacy Test of a Rising Nation

For companies like Tata, now the steward of Air India, the cost of such a tragedy is not merely financial. It touches the realm of perception, identity, and public trust. In an age when national carriers are seen not merely as corporate enterprises but as emissaries of national prestige, safety lapses become more than operational failures. They become symbolic. They raise questions not only about aircraft and crew, but about the calibre of governance, the seriousness of ambition, and the credibility of a rising power.

Most Indians have flown Air India at some point in their lives. We remember the courteous staff, the familiar cadences of home, the comfort of being addressed in our own language even at cruising altitude. But memory is a double ledger. Alongside those impressions lie others: of inexplicable delays, malfunctioning systems, peeling seat fabrics, and a general air of disrepair. The issue is not one of personal competence; many of the airline’s personnel are as professional and devoted as any in the world. Rather, the fault lies in the absences: the absence of systemic discipline, of organisational coherence, and of an ethos that insists, each day, on operational excellence.

As India ascends the economic ladder, it must not neglect the less glamorous scaffolding that holds its ambitions aloft. The invisible systems, maintenance protocols, predictive safety audits, and resilient air traffic management must be as modern and dependable as the aspirations they are meant to serve. National pride, if it is to mean anything, must not be allergic to national scrutiny. The love of country is not proven by silence, but by the willingness to demand better.

Indeed, the modern state, if it is to function, must fulfill three obligations: to operate transparently, to embrace excellence wherever it finds it, and, most crucially, to act.

I. Openness: The First Principle of Modern Governance

If India is to grow not merely in output but in stature, then its institutions must evolve from opaque fortresses into open, intelligent systems, systems that do not merely collect data but respond to it, adapt through it, and reform because of it. In domains as disparate as aviation, finance, medicine, or law, it is not the absence of error that defines modernity, but the ability to recognize error and correct course in real time.

Closed systems, by contrast, are the graveyards of reform. They stifle whistleblowers, punish the honest engineer, and elevate the functionary whose sole virtue lies in inertia. When failure occurs, and it always does, it arrives not as a surprise but as a long-suppressed inevitability. The tragedy is not merely that something went wrong, but that the system had neither the eyes to see nor the language to describe the precursors to failure. Progress, in its truest sense, begins with light. Transparency is not a Western indulgence. It is a civilizational necessity.

Consider the experience of the United States. After decades of aviation mishaps, the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), administered by NASA, instituted a simple but revolutionary mechanism: allow pilots, air traffic controllers, and ground crew to report safety concerns anonymously, without fear of reprisal. What followed was not chaos, but clarity, a growing corpus of near-misses, system anomalies, and procedural gaps that could be studied, anticipated, and remedied.

From this openness arose a culture of preemption rather than reaction. Aircraft designs changed. Training protocols evolved. And most notably, the United States achieved what once seemed a contradiction in terms: a vast, commercially vibrant aviation sector that is also among the safest on earth. There has not been a major commercial airline fatality in over a decade.

This is not the triumph of hardware or capital alone, but of governance, of learning through transparency rather than suppression. Anonymous feedback loops became engines of continuous improvement.

And yet, we in India have our own quiet victories, testimonies to what is possible when light is allowed to shine. In the judiciary, an institution often caricatured as slow-moving and inaccessible, a transformation has begun. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) and the public posting of court judgments have brought a degree of visibility once unthinkable.

Now, any citizen may track how many cases a court has pending, how swiftly it disposes of them, and whether justice is administered with consistency. Judges are no longer abstractions but public actors, operating under the watchful gaze of citizenry and researcher alike. Bottlenecks that once festered unseen are now illuminated. Delay is no longer a mystery but a measurable, addressable problem.

The lesson in both cases is the same. Information, when liberated, does not embarrass institutions, it dignifies them. It grants them the means to correct themselves and the authority to be trusted.

India, standing as it does at the confluence of ancient tradition and future ambition, cannot afford to treat transparency as optional. To be great in the modern sense is not to be infallible, but to be accountable. To govern well is not to suppress error, but to reveal it swiftly and act with reason and resolve.

It is time to build institutions that invite scrutiny, reward honesty, and evolve in the face of evidence. For only in such light can a nation truly grow, not only in its GDP, but in its grace.

II. On the Disciplined Adoption of Best Practices

There is no disgrace in the act of intelligent imitation. Civilisations have always flourished not by the purity of their doctrines but by the selective and relentless borrowing of what works. The Japanese, in the postwar decades, understood this with remarkable clarity. They built industrial resilience not upon grand theory or abstract ideology, but upon the granular discipline of Kaizen, a philosophy of continuous, incremental refinement.

At Toyota, one finds not slogans but systems. Machines are painted white, not for aesthetic vanity, but to expose the slightest oil leak before it becomes a hazard. Workers are not punished for identifying flaws; rather, they are empowered to halt production when a deviation is noticed. The entire enterprise functions not as a monument to perfection but as a laboratory of perpetual adjustment. Feedback is not a ritual, it is a principle embedded into the machinery of progress.

And this principle is not confined to the assembly line. Consider the example of Heathrow Airport, where “Red Cap” safety officers are deployed across terminals, empowered to log hazards in real time, from a slick tile to an unattended bag. These observations, fed into a centralized digital system, trigger rapid redesign and preventive action. The effect is a system that adapts before it fails, that observes before it reacts. Risk is not eliminated, but managed with foresight.

Or take the DuPont STOP Program, instituted in some of the world’s most hazardous environments, chemical plants, mines, and refineries. Here, workers are trained not only to observe their surroundings but to observe one another. Near-misses are no longer buried in silence; they are documented, discussed, and mined for insight. And from this culture of watchfulness has emerged a measurable decline in workplace incidents, not through enforcement alone, but through a distributed ethic of vigilance.

Now contrast this with our own public systems. How often are electrical faults, maintenance irregularities, or broken in-flight equipment dismissed as minor nuisances, tolerated with a shrug, buried beneath a culture of "chalta hai"? In such environments, the small signal is ignored until it grows teeth. Complacency becomes institutionalised, and feedback is treated not as a gift but as an affront.

There is, too, the matter of jugaad, that much-celebrated ingenuity of the Indian spirit, praised for its improvisational genius and its ability to navigate constraint. In moments of entrepreneurial daring or in times of resource scarcity, such inventiveness is admirable. It is, in its place, a virtue. But when elevated to a principle of governance or embedded within the architecture of engineering systems, it ceases to be a strength and becomes a hazard.

The ethos of jugad or chalta hai, the belief that “this will do” and stopgap solutions, when allowed to seep into design frameworks or institutional protocols, corrodes from within. It weakens safety mechanisms, dulls the edge of professional rigour, and invites failure not by accident but by design. A modern infrastructure cannot be built on makeshift solutions. It must rest on precision, accountability, and a culture that does not tolerate approximation where reliability is required.

Indeed, the most profound improvements in institutional performance often begin not with capital investment, but with a change in attitude. Small shifts in cultural expectation, toward excellence, toward responsibility, can yield exponential gains in robustness. Systems, like societies, are ultimately shaped by what they are willing to insist upon.

If India is to grow, not only in size but in stature, then we must rid ourselves of the idea that learning from others is a confession of inferiority. On the contrary, it is the highest form of seriousness: to observe what works elsewhere, and to graft it carefully onto our own institutions.

III. Embracing Criticism as a Form of Patriotism

Let us not delude ourselves, we are not China, Russia or somebody else and nor should we wish or aspire to be. India’s power lies not in uniformity but in argument. In its most glorious periods, India did not suppress dissent; it cultivated it. And yet today, a critique, even when rooted in evidence, is too often met with suspicion, or worse, with vilification. This is not the reflex of a confident state. It is the reaction of a fragile one.

In the United States, the Challenger space shuttle disaster led to the Rogers Commission, where physicist Richard Feynman’s dissenting appendix (btw a fascinating read for Air India management), initially unwelcome, became the document's moral core, leading to lasting reforms in NASA’s risk assessment practices.

In post-Apartheid South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, was not merely a political exercise but a structural one, an institutional act of listening. Its task was not to punish, but to reveal, and in that revelation, to lay the foundation for a more legitimate state.

In the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy, citizen-led scrutiny, not bureaucratic initiative, forced the discourse on industrial safety into the national consciousness. Similarly, the improvements in India’s electoral transparency, such as the introduction of electronic voting machines with VVPAT and tighter campaign finance regulations, emerged not from executive enthusiasm, but from years of civil society advocacy and judicial oversight.

In each case, it was criticism, measured, informed, and persistent, that acted as a lever of institutional evolution.

Not everyone who raises questions is hostile. Some are merely intolerant of decay. Others have a finer sensitivity to systemic risk. In a democracy, disagreement is not a design flaw, it is a design feature. If we are to build the complex, safety-critical systems required to govern a billion citizens, we must learn to harness, not silence, the hive mind. In this regard, criticism, when aimed at structure rather than malice, is not merely tolerable, it is indispensable. It is, in the truest sense, a form of patriotism.

India is not lacking in intent. It has never lacked for white papers, expert committees, or memoranda written in the finest bureaucratic prose. But intent without execution is a kind of national theatre, an illusion of seriousness without the burden of consequence.

As the economy grows at 6–7%, the infrastructure gaps will not close on their own. They will widen. Velocity without vigilance is the most dangerous of combinations. Whether it is a startup or a sovereign state, scale must be accompanied by systems, or risk collapse. To govern a nation of India’s size and complexity without rigorous operational protocols is to build skyscrapers on sand.

And none of this, let us remind ourselves, is unprecedented. Every modern nation has faced this juncture, where ambition outpaced systems, where tragedy exposed design, and where the response determined whether the nation was truly ready to take its place in the front ranks of history.

The Legitimacy of the Modern State

In the end, the question is one of legitimacy. Not of electoral mandate, but of conduct. Can the state deliver services, maintain order, and safeguard the lives of its citizens not just in spirit but in function? Legitimacy lies not in slogans, nor in sentiment, but in the quiet, reliable performance of institutions.

Yes, no system is perfect. Human error will always find a way in. But systemic failure, when allowed to fester, ceases to be an error. It becomes policy by negligence.

Greatness, then, is not an image projected abroad. It is a structure built at home. It is measured not in prestige rankings, but in the resilience of power grids, the cleanliness of water, the reliability of transport, and the safety of the skies.

A rising India does not need to choose between pride and progress. But it must recognize that the former, if not matched by the latter, becomes theatre. And no nation ever flew far on theatre alone.