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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.)

Language on the Meter

The Marathi language rule for auto and taxi drivers can promote integration, but only if it does not become another instrument of identity politics.

The political scenario in Maharashtra has changed after the Cockroach Janata Party’s (CJP) agitation, and every political party is now trying to woo ‘Gen Z’ which could emerge as a significant vote bank by 2029. But Maharashtra’s political conversation has moved to a much more emotionally charged issue: the Marathi language requirement for auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers.


What began as a transport regulation has quickly become a political contest involving Marathi identity, migrant livelihoods and the BJP’s relationship with the sizeable North Indian electorate in Mumbai and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.


Language Barrier

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has had to step in to clarify that Hindi-speaking drivers are not expected to become experts in Marathi, but only need enough of the language to conduct their daily work. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, meanwhile, has attacked the policy, questioning whether language can become a barrier to earning a livelihood in another state.


The Maharashtra government has made “working knowledge” of Marathi mandatory for auto-rickshaw, taxi and app-based cab drivers. The rule extends not only to traditional autos and taxis but also to drivers working with aggregators such as Ola, Uber and Rapido. Compliance is linked to their ability to continue operating.


RTO teams have been conducting practical tests rather than formal examinations. Drivers are asked basic questions and everyday phrases relating to destinations, fares, routes, meters, travel time and payments. A 16-question format has been reported, designed around situations a driver is likely to encounter with passengers.


The scale of enforcement explains why the issue has suddenly become explosive. In the first five days of inspections, authorities checked 35,190 commercial passenger vehicles across Maharashtra, including 14,399 in the MMR, and issued 4,729 notices statewide, of which 2,239 were in the MMR. On August 24 alone, 1,392 drivers were checked in the MMR and 139 were found lacking the required proficiency.


Drivers who fail the test are not immediately supposed to lose their livelihoods. They receive a notice and are given time to acquire the required working knowledge. Under the rules, however, continued non-compliance can eventually lead to suspension and, for repeated violations, cancellation of the licence or badge.


That is where the policy becomes more complicated. For a driver who works 10–12 hours a day, has limited formal education or has lived in Mumbai for years without needing to speak Marathi fluently, learning a new language under the threat of losing his livelihood is understandably intimidating.


Legal Problem

There is also a legal question. The Bombay High Court struck down a similar requirement for autorickshaw permits in 2017, raising questions about the statutory basis and the manner in which the present rule is being enforced.


The answer lies somewhere between “Marathi must be compulsory” and “nobody should be forced to learn Marathi”.


Mumbai cannot function without communication. A passenger should be able to tell a driver where he wants to go, negotiate or understand the fare, ask for directions and communicate basic safety or emergency information. For that purpose, basic Marathi proficiency is a perfectly reasonable requirement for a public-facing transport worker.


But basic conversational Marathi is very different from linguistic proficiency. That distinction should become the foundation of the government’s policy.


Maharashtra has already taken one important corrective step by announcing 161 Marathi language training centres across the state and a dedicated RTO helpline to address complaints of harassment, illegal fines and procedural irregularities. In the MMR, 16 of the 48 earlier training centres are also being reopened.


This should go further. Every driver receiving a notice should automatically be given access to a free, government-recognised Marathi course. The course should be short, practical and audio-visual, teaching perhaps 50–100 sentences relevant to driving rather than grammar, literature or writing. Drivers should be allowed multiple attempts, and the test should be standardised across all RTOs.


The issue is not whether Marathi deserves protection. It does. Marathi is Maharashtra’s official and cultural language, and there is nothing unreasonable about expecting people who live and work here to acquire a basic knowledge of it.


But Mumbai has historically succeeded because it has absorbed people from across India. The city does not need to choose between Marathi and Hindi. It can accommodate both.


Political Minefield

The BJP, meanwhile, faces a difficult balancing act. Its Maharashtra leadership cannot ignore Marathi sentiment, but it also cannot afford to alienate migrant communities that have traditionally formed an important part of its urban support base. The emergence of the BJP’s own labour cell criticising alleged harassment of non-Marathi drivers demonstrates just how delicate the issue has become. The labour cell has even threatened an MMR-wide strike if alleged harassment continues.


For the Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde, the controversy offers an opportunity to reclaim the Marathi identity space traditionally associated with the Sena and the MNS. For the Uddhav Thackeray-led Sena (UBT), the challenge is different: it has criticised policies affecting drivers’ livelihoods while simultaneously trying to retain its Marathi identity credentials. The MNS, unsurprisingly, has adopted the most aggressive position, warning non-Marathi drivers to learn Marathi or leave Maharashtra.


The Marathi passenger benefits if communication becomes easier. The non-Marathi driver benefits because he gains a practical skill and greater integration into Mumbai society. The government benefits because implementation becomes less confrontational. And Mumbai benefits because its public transport system becomes more inclusive rather than more polarised.


The biggest losers would be the drivers themselves and ordinary commuters. A prolonged strike or large-scale suspension of licences could affect daily mobility across the MMR, particularly for passengers who depend on autos and taxis for last-mile connectivity.


The Maharashtra government therefore has an opportunity to turn a politically sensitive controversy into a model of linguistic integration. The correct message should not be: “Speak Marathi or leave Mumbai.”


It should be simpler: “You live and work in Maharashtra — learn enough Marathi to connect with the people you serve.”


(The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

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