Building collapse is one of the worst disasters occurring in Delhi. Yet, it is dealt with the usual sarkari blame-game, perfunctory inspections and enquiries that are rarely followed up with action.
Delhi saw a similar cycle of events after a five-storey building collapsed in northwest Delhi’s Sawan Park on Wednesday morning. Seven people were killed. The Delhi government ordered a magisterial enquiry. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation sought a fresh survey of all buildings under its jurisdiction.
The rules say that the surveyors must look for buildings that are ruinous or dilapidated, likely to fall or are dangerous to passersby or neighbourhood properties. Officials say they try to determine all these by looking for the most visible signs — cracks or a tilt.
But the structural safety of a building is checked only if it is in the most distressed state. The owners are asked to repair or demolish the structure. If they don’t comply, the corporation can evict the occupants and repair or demolish the building at the owner’s cost. “Usually, a building shows signs of danger. But sometimes, it just collapses suddenly,” says an official.
However, despite complaints by residents, the Sawan Park building didn’t make it to the list of 178 ‘dangerous’ structures’ identified in this year’s survey.
Apart from the usual old-age and decay, what threatens most buildings in Delhi is structural fragility. They are simply built badly. Every third resident in the city lives in a poorly provisioned home in an ‘unauthorised’ or ‘unauthorised-regularised’ neighbourhood where houses have been built without any sanctioned plan or design.
Even the so-called ‘legal’ housing is not necessarily built by the book. Unfortunately, instead of trying to strengthen the enforcement mechanism, the authorities want to regularise construction violations on the basis of a certificate from a civil engineer vouching for the safety of the main structure. But who would inspect a system that has allowed such illegalities in the first place?
Granted, a shortage of affordable housing and space has incentivised illegal construction. In the absence of public housing, people turned to the illegal market where homes were cheap but not structurally safe. Granted, given the scale of irregularities, mass demolition is not an option. Regularisation drives recognise the rights of the citizenry to housing and workspace. But no matter how many justifications we have for the mess, they do not absolve the authorities, which have failed to plan, build, enforce and regulate the city’s housing sector.
Can there be a course correction? Yes, say experts, but only if the authorities are willing to quantify the problem, institute remedial measures and create a prevention mechanism so the future constructions can be safe. “Right now, everything is left a junior municipal engineer who may not even be qualified to handle structural safety,” says the official.
Delhi doesn’t lack expertise, says A K Jain, former planning commissioner of DDA. He suggests that the city authorities tap talent from engineering institutes and professional bodies of structural safety experts, who can conduct professional surveys and suggest remedies. But none of these will have any meaning without follow-up action.
After the 2010 building collapse in Lalita Park, which killed 71 people, a survey of 10,000 buildings had found that a majority of them were in a “poor state of health,” says Chandan Ghosh of the National Institute of Disaster Management that supervised the inspection. Eight years on, East Delhi is still the hub of illegal constructions.
For better enforcement, the city needs to create an agency comprising building officials, structural experts, residents associations, police and disaster management agencies. “While all old buildings must be surveyed by qualified experts, new buildings must undergo third-party checks at the construction stage itself. When a building is in a bad shape, repairing and retrofitting is either too expensive or not feasible at all,” says Ghosh.
Early detection also helps if the house owners are on board. Availability of structural engineers and trained masons for a reasonable fee and even a subsidy scheme for certain income groups in dire need of home improvement could draw more people in.
With much of Delhi situated in the extremely high-risk seismic zone IV, each case of building collapse should be a wake-up call.
An oft-repeated saying by seismologists that “quakes don’t kill people, buildings do” sums up the potential danger the city is staring at.
First Published: Oct 01, 2018 10:33 IST
