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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.)

From Education to Employment: Bridging India’s Skills Gap

A qualification does not always translate into employability. The EEE framework seeks to bridge that gap by connecting education, skills and employment.

 

When Aarav Kulkarni, a commerce graduate from Pune, completed his degree, he had good academic marks but struggled to find a job that matched his qualifications. Like many young Indians, Aarav realised that a degree alone was not enough to secure the right employment. Employers were increasingly looking for practical skills, digital knowledge and relevant industry experience.


His situation reflects a larger challenge facing India — the persistent gap between education and employment, where academic qualifications do not always translate into workplace readiness.


The Union Budget 2026–27 attempts to address this gap through the proposed Education to Employment and Enterprise (EEE) Standing Committee. The initiative aims to connect education, skills, employment and entrepreneurship more closely and create a workforce capable of competing effectively in the global services economy.


From a Chartered Accountant's perspective, the most important aspect is the financial footprint of this approach. The Ministry of Education has been allocated Rs 1,39,289.48 crore for 2026–27, representing an 8.27 per cent increase over the previous budget estimate.


However, the success of such spending cannot be measured only by the amount allocated. The real test will be whether these investments translate into better employability, higher productivity, increased incomes and the creation of new enterprises. In other words, the focus must ultimately be on outcomes rather than expenditure alone.


The EEE framework is expected to focus on service sectors that have strong potential for economic growth, employment and exports. India has set an ambitious long-term objective of increasing its share of the global services market to 10 per cent by 2047, making the development of an appropriately skilled workforce particularly important.


The budget also proposes five university townships near major industrial and logistics corridors. The objective is to bring universities, research institutions, skill centres and industry closer together. Such integration can help address the long-standing mismatch between academic education and industry requirements by creating stronger links between learning and employment.


Another significant measure is the proposal for one girls' hostel in every district, aimed at improving access to higher education, particularly in STEM fields. Greater participation of women in education can eventually translate into greater participation in the workforce and entrepreneurship, strengthening the broader employment ecosystem.


The EEE framework should therefore not be viewed as a single scheme carrying one specific budget allocation. Instead, its financial footprint is spread across education, research, apprenticeships, skilling, digital infrastructure, employment and enterprise development. Its effectiveness will depend on how well these different areas work together.


For businesses, this approach could have long-term financial benefits. A better-trained workforce can reduce recruitment and training costs, improve productivity and help Indian companies compete more effectively internationally. For entrepreneurs and startups, the availability of skilled manpower can also support faster expansion and make it easier to build and scale enterprises.


At the same time, there is a need for strong financial discipline. Government spending should increasingly be linked to measurable outcomes such as placement rates, wages, apprenticeships completed, businesses created and export revenues generated. Merely increasing allocations without monitoring outcomes may limit the impact of the policy.

 

The EEE framework represents an important change in thinking. Instead of treating education as the final destination, it seeks to make education the starting point of a larger economic journey.

 

For students like Aarav, the real success of Budget 2026–27 will not be measured by the size of the Budget alone, but by whether it helps transform a degree into a career, an idea into an enterprise and talent into economic value.


(The writer is a Chartered Accountant based in Thane. Views personal.)

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