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By:

Prithvi Asthana

20 August 2025 at 5:20:30 pm

Employee says the fire alarm did not go off

Many officials could not use fire extinguishers Mumbai: In a tragic incident a large fire broke out in the basement of Aaykar Bhavan, the Income Tax office located on Maharshi Karve Road at Churchgate in Mumbai on Monday. According to the sources, the fire broke out at 1:30 pm, but the Mumbai Fire Brigade received the initial call at 2:01 pm and officially declared it as Level-I fire around 2:15 pm. No casualties were reported in the incident and all the employees were rescued from the...

Employee says the fire alarm did not go off

Many officials could not use fire extinguishers Mumbai: In a tragic incident a large fire broke out in the basement of Aaykar Bhavan, the Income Tax office located on Maharshi Karve Road at Churchgate in Mumbai on Monday. According to the sources, the fire broke out at 1:30 pm, but the Mumbai Fire Brigade received the initial call at 2:01 pm and officially declared it as Level-I fire around 2:15 pm. No casualties were reported in the incident and all the employees were rescued from the building. As the building has a centralised air conditioning system and all the windows were closed the smoke from the fire spread rapidly throughout the building. The thick smoke also spread to the surrounding areas pf the building. Around 23 vehicles of the Mumbai Fire Brigade (MFB) were engaged under the intense operation to extinguish the fire from different gates at the building. Backup ambulances police officials, and the BEST staff, were also seen at the site. The MFB deployed a DFO, ADFO, three Senior Station Officers and two Station Officers, along with three fire engines, one CFF, three jet units, one AWTT, one MWT, one WQRV, one TTL and one ALP. Specialised equipment including aerial ladder platform was deployed to evacuate people from the upper floors. Two people, a male and a female were rescued from the Guest House at the seventh floor of the building. Firefighters were successful in rescuing the staff on the lower floors as well. According to an employee, who requested anonymity said, “The fire broke out at 1:30 pm when the staff was having lunch, but the fire alarms did not go off.” “We were not allowed to exit from the main gate,” he added. The employee said, “The fire was confined to the basement and the smoke went up to all the floors of building.” Asked about the loss, the employee said, “As the fire broke out in the godown no person was injured. But the records kept in godown that are mostly old records have been burnt.” When asked about the fire drill protocol, the employee said, “The office staff did not know how to use the extinguishers, a possible reason why the fire’s intensity kept increasing.” Officials did not confirm the cause of the fire and or damage caused in the basement area. The Aaykar Bhavan, Income Tax office is multi-storey government building that serves as a workplace for a large number of Income Tax officials.

Industrial Decay

The most revealing thing about Maharashtra’s industrial crisis may be that it takes the threat of factories leaving for the government to notice the roads leading to them. At Chakan, one of India’s – and not just Maharashtra’s - most important industrial clusters, at least 20 companies recently indicated they are prepared to shift operations because their workers could not commute, trucks cannot move and basic infrastructure cannot keep pace with industrial growth. As many as 35 companies have reportedly sought plots in Khandala, with 20 expressing a firm intention to relocate. The state’s response has been to promise that potholes will be filled and that the wider infrastructure deficiencies will be fixed within ten months.


Chakan is not merely a badly maintained industrial estate. It is a warning about the way Maharashtra has allowed its industrial infrastructure to deteriorate even as it celebrates itself as India’s industrial powerhouse. The irony is almost painful: the MIDC can build 45-metre and 70-metre internal roads, yet companies are forced to approach their factories through eight-metre and 12-metre roads controlled by a bewildering collection of agencies. The result has been traffic jams, potholes, inadequate parking, waste-management problems and trucks competing with commuters for the same inadequate road space.


Chakan should not be treated as an isolated embarrassment. Similar complaints about roads, congestion, utilities, transport links and civic infrastructure have surfaced across Maharashtra’s major industrial belts. Whether in Pune’s wider industrial corridor, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Nashik, Aurangabad, Nagpur or other established MIDC clusters, the underlying problem in Maharashtra is increasingly familiar: industry is being asked to operate at twenty-first-century speeds on infrastructure governed by twentieth-century institutional arrangements.


Industries Minister Uday Samant’s visit and the high-level committee and the promise of time-bound repairs are minimum assurances. But Maharashtra should be wary of congratulating itself for responding to a crisis that should never have reached this point.


The minister also sought to play down the relocation threat, saying that migration did not come up in his meeting with industrialists. Whether every company eventually leaves Chakan is almost beside the point. The fact that established businesses are seriously examining alternatives because basic infrastructure has become a constraint is itself an indictment.


Maharashtra cannot simultaneously demand investment, advertise itself as an industrial destination and treat the infrastructure supporting that investment as an afterthought. Investors, too, have choices and care about the cost and reliability of getting from factory to customer.


If the state wants to remain an industrial powerhouse, it must stop measuring success by the number of factories it attracts and start measuring it by how efficiently those factories can function. Chakan is the warning. The potholes are merely the most visible part of it.

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