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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.)

Seven crushed in Mumbai hillock crash

Mumbai: At least seven people were killed and six others injured after a portion of a hillock collapsed on some homes beneath at Gausiya Chawl off Chiragnagar in Ghatkopar where they were sleeping, early on Wednesday following torrential downpour, officials said.


Among the victims are three minor children aged 2-14 and one victim has yet to be identified as rescue operations are on in full swing to save a few more persons still feared buried under the debris.


Locals eyewitnesses and officials said that the tragedy occurred around 3 am, when huge quantities of soil, boulders and debris suddenly came crashing down from Hill No. 3 with deafening noise on three-four shanties, burying many of the occupants in deep sleep who could not even scream for help.


Awakened by the crash sounds, many from the neighbourhood ran out in panic, some fearing it was an earthquake, as per an eyewitness, and others informed the Mumbai Fire Brigade and Mumbai Police.


They rushed teams there and were soon joined by the NDRF and SDRF to launch rescue operations in the dark as intermittent rains continued. They face a major obstacle as the approach path to the disaster site was very narrow and hampered the movement of men and equipment.


Deputy Commissioner of Police Ganesh Shinde said that soon after learning of the disaster, the search and rescue operations were launched. Nevertheless, local youths joined the efforts by forming relay queues to pick up and move the debris to save those trapped underneath.


Grueling Efforts

After several hours of grueling efforts, seven victims were dug out of the rubble and taken to the BMC's Rajawadi Hospital where they were pronounced dead on admission.


Their identities are: Aban Arif Sheikh (02), Mannat Arif Shaikh (04), Marjina Arif Shaikh (27), all from a family; Mohammed Samir Ansari (14), Sahil Hussein A. Kazi (19) and Vivek Ramesh (27). The seventh victim’s identity is yet to be ascertained.


Among the injured are Sohail Ansari, Mohammed Ansari, Sajid Ansari and Naimuddin Iqbal Khan, who are undergoing treatment at the hospital.


Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy CMs Eknath Shinde and Sunetra Pawar mourned the loss of lives in the disaster, while Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde, along with Ward Committee Chairman Vijendra Shinde, Additional Municipal Commissioner (Eastern Suburbs) Dr. Avinash Dhakne and Assistant Municipal Commissioner (L-Ward) Anil Jadhav rushed to the crash site.


Later, the Mayor announced an ex-gratia payment of Rs 4-Lakhs to the kin of each deceased and Rs 50,000 for the injured, even as locals raised questions about their safety in such vulnerable settlements despite tall promises by the government.


Mumbai Congress President and MP Varsha Gaikwad had first highlighted the risks in the unsafe hilly belts of Kurla-Ghatkopar in April and later in July, to the Collector, demanding a proper audit and constructing a retaining wall on the slopes. “Sadly, not much has been done and today we saw innocent lives being lost. Will the administration wake up now at least? This government likes to tom-tom about infrastructure but there is little work on what actually people need and will save their lives,” she said.


Landslides-Mumbai’s biggest killers
Land-slides and hill-slides have killed around 340 people in Mumbai in nearly 35 years, besides injuring 300-plus between 1992-2026, said RTI activist Anil Galgali. He said in 25 out of 36 Assembly constituencies in the city, 257 spots in the hilly areas are red-flagged as ‘dangerous’.

Galgali said that the MHADA’s Mumbai Slum Improvement Board had recommended shifting 9,657 huts out of 22,483 huts in these areas on priority and protecting the remaining by building retaining walls. In Sep. 2011, then CM Prithviraj Chavan gave orders to prepare an action plan, but in 15 years nothing has moved.

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