A fire at an animation studio in Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, killed at least fourteen people on the evening of June 22nd. The studio, located in a multi-storey commercial building, was reported to have been operating with inadequate fire escapes and suppression systems at the time of the blaze. Emergency services reached the scene and the fire was eventually brought under control, but the toll — fourteen dead and several others injured — reflects a pattern of structural failures in India’s rapidly expanding commercial real estate and technology sector. The animation and visual effects industry in India has grown dramatically over the past decade, driven by outsourcing from Hollywood studios, domestic streaming demand, and a surge of investment in tier-two cities like Lucknow that offer lower overheads than Mumbai or Bengaluru. The business case is compelling; the safety infrastructure that should accompany rapid commercial expansion has not kept pace.
The received wisdom
The humanitarian case for alarm is immediate and obvious. India’s fire safety record in commercial premises is, by any measure, poor. The National Crime Records Bureau has documented hundreds of fire-related deaths annually in Indian workplaces, and enforcement of the National Building Code and fire safety regulations has been consistently undermined by a combination of regulatory capture, bribery, bureaucratic inefficiency, and the sheer scale of informal construction. The progressive critique points to structural inequality: the workers who died in Lucknow were likely among India’s growing but still economically precarious creative workforce — young animators, assistants, and support staff drawn to the sector by the promise of digital economy employment. They are not the managers or investors who benefit from keeping compliance costs low. The pressure to cut corners on safety is a pressure that falls disproportionately on workers without the bargaining power to insist on proper protections. A genuine commitment to India’s development trajectory requires treating worker safety as a foundational input, not a discretionary cost.
A different read
That critique is correct as far as it goes. But the regulatory failure in Lucknow is more than a story about exploitation; it is a story about the institutional bottlenecks that constrain India’s productive capacity in ways that both progressives and free-market liberals need to take seriously.
India’s regulatory environment for commercial construction is not, in general, too lax. If anything, it is in formal terms excessively complex — a legacy of successive layers of legislation from the colonial era through the post-independence planning state, generating a baroque system of permits, no-objection certificates, and compliance requirements that a business operating entirely within the law would find prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to satisfy. The predictable consequence of this complexity is not compliance; it is informal accommodation. Buildings are constructed, certified, and occupied through processes that involve negotiated understandings with local authorities rather than genuine adherence to code. A studio in a tier-two city does not have fire escapes because the cost of formal compliance, in time and money, exceeds what the local market can bear — and because the local enforcement apparatus has neither the resources nor the institutional independence to insist.
This is the paradox of India’s regulatory state: it is simultaneously over-regulated on paper and under-enforced in practice. The result is not the outcome either reformers or progressives would choose. It is a system in which formal sector businesses pay compliance costs that informal sector competitors do not, creating competitive pressure to cut corners across the board; in which enforcement is episodic and often corrupt, so that operators have no reliable signal about what level of compliance is actually required; and in which catastrophic events like the Lucknow fire prompt official inquiries, ministerial statements, and enhanced inspections that last for several months before the default equilibrium reasserts itself.
Prime Minister Modi’s administration has made bureaucratic simplification a stated priority, and there have been genuine improvements in some areas — the Ease of Doing Business reforms have cut the number of procedures required to start a business, and some states have streamlined construction permitting. But simplification at the federal level does not automatically translate to improved enforcement at the municipal level, where the actual discretion over building certification lies. Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state by population and one of its most economically significant by size, has a particular governance challenge: its administrative apparatus is enormous, its geographic spread makes centralised oversight difficult, and political pressures on enforcement agencies are acute in a state where every major commercial investment has political dimensions.
The families of the fourteen people who died in Lucknow will not be served by abstract arguments about regulatory architecture. They need accountability for specific failures. But the specific failures in Lucknow will recur — in the next city, the next sector, the next boom — unless India develops a credible enforcement capacity that does not depend on episodic political will. That requires not more regulation, but better regulation: simpler, enforced consistently, and insulated from the informal accommodations that make the current system so deadly.
What to watch
Watch the official investigation into the Lucknow fire for whether it produces accountability at the ownership and certification level — not simply for the on-site workers who failed to evacuate. Watch whether Uttar Pradesh’s state government uses the incident to conduct systematic reviews of commercial premises in tier-two cities, or whether it confines its response to the immediate site. Watch India’s animation and visual effects industry associations for any collective response on safety standards — a sector trying to attract international clients has reputational incentives to self-regulate that the broader construction sector does not. And watch whether this incident feeds into the broader Indian political debate about urban governance and the accountability of municipal bodies, which has been intermittently prominent in state elections.
— J