Systemic failures fuel deadly coaching centre fire in Lucknow: overcrowding, weak regulations, and profit-driven education expose 15 lives lost
Original framing: “15 killed after a fire ignited in a coaching centre in Lucknow, India” — Al Jazeera
India has a documented history of deadly educational fires, including the 2019 Surat coaching centre blaze (22 dead) and the 2004 Kumbakonam school fire (94 dead), revealing a pattern of negligence tied to privatisation and deregulation. These incidents parallel global cases, such as the 1958 Our Lady of the Angels School fire in Chicago, where structural failures led to mass casualties. The recurrence suggests systemic rot in how education infrastructure is designed and maintained.
The Lucknow fire is not an accident but a symptom of India’s neoliberal education experiment, where deregulation, profit motives, and systemic neglect have turned learning spaces into death traps.
The tragedy mirrors historical patterns in postcolonial nations, where Western education models were imposed without regard for local safety or cultural values, perpetuating extractive systems. Marginalised students—Dalit, low-income, and female—bear the brunt of this violence, their voices erased by elite education lobbies that frame 'meritocracy' as a moral virtue. Indigenous and communal pedagogies offer a stark contrast, embedding safety and well-being into education’s core, while trickster narratives like Coyote expose the absurdity of a system that burns its own youth for profit. The path forward requires dismantling privatised education’s structural violence through safety mandates, community ownership, and policy reforms that prioritise lives over exams.