The Bhiwandi building collapse tragedy, which claimed 10 lives, once more exposes the deadly gap between Maharashtra’s ability to identify urban hazards and its inability to eliminate them. It exposes the uncomfortable truth that the state lacks the will and machinery to act on warnings. Authorities say the structure was built without necessary permissions and had already been declared unsafe by the local civic body. Yet, like countless other dangerous buildings across the Mumbai metropolitan region, it remained occupied. By now, everybody knows that Mumbai’s collapsing buildings are not accidents of nature but failures of governance, where warnings are documented and yet citizens continue to pay the ultimate price. Every monsoon, civic bodies in Mumbai and its neighbouring cities conduct the same ritual of inspecting old structures and preparing lists of dangerous buildings. The question is why are people still live inside buildings officially declared unsafe? For thousands of families, moving out of a dangerous building is not a simple matter of following a municipal order given that housing in Mumbai is scarce and expensive. Redevelopment promises often remain trapped in legal disputes for years. For residents, an unsafe home often remains the only affordable home. But sympathy for these constraints cannot become an excuse for administrative failure. Mumbai’s record is littered with reminders of these. The Virar building collapse last year, which killed 17 people, was another grim warning of ageing and unauthorised structures continuing to claim lives. The BMC’s own pre-monsoon surveys regularly identify hundreds of buildings in the most dangerous C-1 category, which includes structures considered unfit for habitation and often beyond economical repair. For this monsoon, 337 such buildings were identified across Mumbai. The Centre has repeatedly pointed out that building approvals, structural safety and enforcement are primarily responsibilities of state governments and urban local bodies. This division of responsibility may be legally correct, but for citizens buried under collapsed concrete, administrative jurisdiction is irrelevant. They only see a system that knew and failed. The deeper problem is that Mumbai’s urban governance has become better at recording danger than eliminating it. A city aspiring to become a global financial centre cannot allow housing to function like a slow-moving disaster zone. The real test of urban governance is not the speed of rescue operations after a collapse. It is whether the collapse could have been prevented in the first place. While clearing the debris after each building collapse is easy, far harder is removing the culture of neglect. That will require something far more difficult: accountability before every catastrophe, not compensation after it.
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