Airplane Crash Takes 279 Lives in Ahmedabad — How Many More Until We Confront Systemic Negligence?
The country froze in shock when Flight AI 171 took off from Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025. None of us could have imagined the horror that awaited just beyond the horizon. In an instant, 241 travelers lost their lives. Thirty-three young doctors and students—living in their hostel, dreaming of healing others—were gone too. One person survived by sheer luck, but survival should never be a gamble.
Months before that morning, Boeing engineers quietly warned their managers about dangerous gaps in the Dreamliner’s fuselage and electrical shortcuts. Their concerns were filed away in binders and buried in boardrooms. Alarms blared. Pilots reported engine trouble. But tight schedules and cost targets drowned out every warning.
The result? Families setting out empty chairs at dinner. A city struggling to gather its shattered heart.
After Air India was privatized in 2022, regulators issued fine after fine for safety lapses—each met with a muted apology instead of real reform. Shareholders cheered rising profit margins while grieving families counted exits that would never open again. And what did Tata, Air India’s owner, offer? A ₹1 crore compensation—pocket change for a conglomerate built on public assets and corporate welfare. This wasn’t compassion. It was a PR stunt, meant to distract from the rot they now preside over.
Since privatization, safety violations have risen while accountability has vanished. What Tata bought was not just an airline—it was the power to gamble with our lives for profit. We’ve seen this pattern before: public institutions deliberately weakened, handed to private players, and stripped to their bones under the logic of cost-cutting—on maintenance, on wages, on safety itself.
When will we come to our senses and ask the real question? These are not isolated tragedies. These are disasters waiting to happen.
This is the price we pay when human lives become footnotes in financial reports. We’ve seen it before—train derailments in Odisha, recurring railway bridge collapses, industrial accidents in factories and power plants—each exposing how profit-driven models ignore maintenance, safety, and the public good. When essential services are handed over to corporations, standards erode. Mumbai’s local trains crush working-class lives in overcrowded coaches and collapsing platforms—grim proof that neglected public transport is caving in under privatized and underfunded systems.
From railways to aviation to healthcare, privatization has not led to improvement—it has led to decline. And ordinary people are left to pay the price.
Our sorrow cannot end in silence.
We demand a public investigation that lays bare every black-box reading, maintenance log, and internal memo. If Boeing, Air India, or our ministry failed in their duty, they must answer in full public view—not behind secret settlements.
We also demand the resignation of Union Aviation Minister K. Rammohan Raju, under whose leadership Air India was privatized, safety violations were ignored, and public safety protocols steadily dismantled.
This was not an accident. It was the fatal cost of profit-driven neglect. The capitalist logic of profit over people leads to the deaths of innocent lives—traded in for soaring corporate gains.
We demand an end to privatization and urge the masses to forge militant unity in the struggle for quality, publicly funded healthcare, housing, education, and transport—monitored and audited by the people. The government cannot continue to shirk its responsibilities. We call for the nationalization of private companies that endanger lives, and for the delivery of affordable, well-maintained, and accountable public services.
Disha calls on all of us to rise in rage against systemic negligence!
Demand good-quality, publicly funded, affordable transport—for all!!
