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Design Case study
Welts of Slow Violence
The Vishakapatnam Gas Leak, 2020
by
Index
About
While India was in the throes of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, on 7 May 2020, a tragedy struck in the early morning at R. R. Venkatapuram village, Vishakapatnam (Vizag), India. A gas leak killed a few people and injured countless others. The video presents the Vizag gas leak from the viewpoint of various challenges of handling such accidents and disasters. It highlights the issues of "slow violence", "globalized notion of risk", and "learning from accidents" while trying to comprehend the tragedy from the viewpoint of the dispossessed and displaced. The case study builds on existing newspaper reports and other online media but goes beyond them to comprehend the disaster from the viewpoint of academic concepts for making sense of the tragedy. This video while serving as a medium to create awareness as a basis for discussion will also enable critical thinking in the realm of knowledge about human factors, accident investigation, sociology of technology, risk and disasters.
This case study is a part of the larger project on "India's Disasters over the Decades" championed by Vivek Kant, HFSS Studios:
https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/~vivek.kant/indian-disasters/
