top of page

By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 7:46:04 pm

A Notice Is Not a Wall

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings. The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the...

A Notice Is Not a Wall

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings. The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the collapse remains unconfirmed, what is already clear is the lethal cost of allowing buildings to be altered, crowded and repaired without adequate regard for structural safety. Building-collapse investigations generally look at structural weakness, unapproved floor additions, removed load-bearing walls and overloading. Those are engineering questions. The policy question that sits above them is the gap between output and outcome. Delhi’s municipal system, like most regulatory systems in India, has been built to measure and reward the first. It has almost no mechanism for verifying the second. The person who decides to add a floor or convert a house into a PG is rarely the person inside it when the structure fails. That mismatch between who takes the risk and who bears its consequence is a textbook negative externality, and it is why market incentives alone will not fix unsafe construction. Land is expensive, formal housing is out of reach for most young workers and students, and demand for cheap paying-guest accommodation near college campuses stays high year-round. A house becomes a PG. A floor built for one household starts carrying three. The extra income is immediate. The structural cost, if it arrives, arrives later and lands on someone else, split between tenant, neighbour and municipality. Death Traps Structural collapses killed 8,756 people across India between 2018 and 2022, close to five deaths a day, a figure that surfaced in Rajya Sabha proceedings drawing on National Crime Records Bureau data. That is not a data gap. India has building bye-laws, approval procedures and municipal enforcement powers already on the books. What it lacks is an implementation architecture that closes the loop between identifying risk and removing it. Put simply, a notice proves the state has produced an output. It does not prove a structural assessment was completed, that residents were evacuated, that repairs happened, or that a certified engineer signed off. It proves paperwork exists, nothing more. Closing that gap is a design problem, not a resourcing one. Every high-risk building should carry a case number and a named officer accountable for it, with fixed deadlines at each stage: inspection within a set number of days, a structural assessment where required, a decision on repair, evacuation, sealing or demolition, and verification of compliance before closure. The named officer should change with the stage, so responsibility cannot sit with nobody in particular. An overdue inspection should automatically flag the officer holding it. An order left unimplemented past deadline should escalate on its own, with the reason for delay logged, whether that is litigation, an uncooperative owner, a capacity shortfall or an evacuation still pending. This turns an enforcement record into an audit trail. That record should sit in public view, within legitimate privacy limits. A ward-level dashboard showing how many high-risk properties are under inspection, how many have completed structural assessments and how many remain unresolved gives a councillor, a tenant or a journalist a way to verify whether a case is moving, rather than take an official’s word for it. At present, issuing a notice ends an official’s obligation. Under an outcome-based system, an unresolved case stays attached to the administration until the risk is addressed, realigning the incentive from documentation to resolution. The same logic applies to unauthorised construction. A booking is not enforcement. A demolition order is not a demolition. A sealing order is not closure if the property reopens later. The administrative chain should end only once the physical condition of the property has been independently verified, not when a file is marked complete. There is also a straightforward fiscal argument. The Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund pays a standard ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh for every death in a building collapse - a rate applied most recently after the Thane collapse this July. Apply that rate to the death toll in the Satya Niketan case and the ex-gratia payout alone crosses Rs. 12 lakh, before emergency response, hospital treatment, policing, lost working days and litigation are counted. Prevention requires spending before anything visible has gone wrong, which makes it a harder budget line to defend than a rescue operation. That asymmetry, not a lack of resources, is why prevention keeps losing inside the state. The Satya Niketan building had an owner. It had tenants, students renting rooms inside it. Someone should have flagged it for scrutiny before repair work began on a Sunday afternoon. A notice is evidence that the state has seen a risk. It is not evidence the risk has been removed. Only a verified outcome closes that gap, and until the system is built to track outcomes rather than paperwork, the next notice will tell us as little as this one did. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Create a society where everyone matters: Tukaram Mundhe

Mumbai: After ending the day one with high-packed energy, the Malhar festival had more to show on the second-day. The day two of the conclave session had a star-packed line-up of Tukaram Mundhe, Divyenndu Sharma, Richa Chadha, Saina Nehwal, Imitiaz Ali and Priyanshi Sharma. But, the most awaited of them all was the Tukaram Mundhe’s session. An IAS officer who is currently the part of chatter everywhere across the state.


Mundhe, the Commissioner of Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said, “Students organising this fest are not just working in the backroom, or managing the crowd, what they are doing is the act of leadership.”


Describing the transformation in the system of leadership, Mundhe said, “The old style of authoritative and hierarchical leadership needs to pave the way for new system of leadership that today’s youth demands. Leadership is not only about leading a team but also about questioning the status quo, finding the existing gaps and fixing them.”


He said, “Today, the idea of leadership has expanded to a click of the button. A man sitting in a room creates a community on WhatsApp for disaster relief , he becomes a leader or someone with an Instagram post brings the people together to talk about an issue without really organising anything. This is the leadership today’s society has and expects.”


Highlighting the issues of social media world, he said, “In this age, all information is available in the pocket, but the problem is the algorithm. Algorithm is dictating the feeds in the fast-moving world and one might amplify it without even processing the information. This is where the problem lies with the Gen Z.”


Providing the solution, Mundhe said, “One needs to pause and find out the truth behind the reel or the information, the pause is the most important thing in today’s world. One should also think that is it benefitting the society by sharing or amplifying a post .Gen Z should not be dictated by the algorithm but should dictate the algorithm, that is when the society will change.”


Mentioning about Gen Z as potential future leaders, he said, “Gen Z knows how to diagnose the problem, but the those who lead the society to the solutions are the real leaders.”


“Another important point is to do all this without camera, without any credit, do it even when no is supporting, that is the quality of a leader. A leader must have the conviction to go against the flow and take decisions,” he added.


Accumulating all the points, he said, “This will all lead to character development, and when that happens one gets the courage to take the right stand, even if the public is against it.”


He said, “The ultimate goal should be of making a change in the society, do things that benefit the whole society at large making this world a better place.”


Lastly while advising the Gen Z’s , he said, “Gen Z should use the technology to make lives better and create a society where everyone matters.”


Attitude Matters

Carrying his spirit forward the hall waited to hear an inspiring sportsperson, Saina Nehwal, a player who brought Indian badminton to the global level and became a personality inspiring generations.


The session started with Saina Nehwal narrating her badminton journey, but an important aspect which she underlined was the ‘attitude’. She said, “ We all have our journey in life, but the attitude helps to overcome challenges thrown at us.” “A fearless attitude is required to face the unknown problems. A resilient attitude is needed to keep going and not stopping. That is what I did in my life and achieved so much,” she added.


She said, “I always showed my attitude through my badminton. I was never satisfied with my achievements and always wanted to do better. I always spoke with my racket, with my performance.”


“I was never there to play badminton, I wanted to break the barriers and achieve more,” she added.

Comments

bottom of page