7 August 2001
The New York Times
By Barry Bearak
Fire swiftly consumed a thatch-walled shelter for the mentally ill in southern India on Monday morning, killing at least 25 inmates who were shackled to poles, the police said.
Some witnesses reported that when they first heard screams they assumed it was the customary ranting. Then they saw the blaze lighting up the predawn sky. “Everyone inside was chained around their feet, and they didn’t have much chance of getting out of that shed,” said Mumtaj Begum, a woman at the scene.
The shelter was little more than a shanty made of palm fronds, one of a dozen or more places to stow the mentally ill in Erwadi, a town about 350 miles south of Madras.
Inmates were manacled, the authorities said. They slept on the ground. No doctors worked at the privately owned facility, and any hopes for psychiatric recovery were placed in miracles. Erwadi is a pilgrimage site where a Muslim saint was buried 800 years ago.
Care for the mentally ill is no source of pride in impoverished India. Monday’s fire joins many other ghastly incidents that have been described at length in newspapers and lawsuits. But little is ever done to remedy the situation. The cause of Monday’s fire was unknown and the shelter’s owners were arrested as the police pursued an investigation.
“There are clear guidelines to prevent the chaining of people, but no one is paying much attention,” said Ravi Nair, executive director of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center. “The treatment of the mentally ill is a tragedy.”
He added, “In both India and Pakistan, there’s this superstition that if a mental patient is kept near the grave of a saint, they will be cured by some sort of hocus-pocus.”
About 45 people lived in the overcrowded tumbledown shelter, the police said. Some were not manacled as tightly as others and were able to flee uninjured. Five inmates were hospitalized with severe burns.
Many of the bodies, blackened by fire, remained at the smoldering scene for several hours.