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...

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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.)

Three Languages, One English-Dominated Reality

Uday K. Chakraborty
7 days ago
5 min read

India’s language debate has become a political balancing act while schools, higher education and workplaces continue to reward English.

In early August, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin unveiled the state’s two bilingual policy of using Tamil and English in schools. With that TN government has effectively rejected the three-language policy prescribed in National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Earlier some other non-Hindi speaking states including Maharashtra, had also expressed their various reservations on NEP language policy.

Language Paradox

Such events repeatedly bring in to attention the Indian paradox of use of multiple languages in schools, but mostly English in higher education and at work places. Today, young students are burdened with mandatory learning of three languages in schools. For some out-of-state students, additionally acquiring rudimentary proficiency of mother tongue is also expected for social and cultural purposes. Now, that’s a heavy load of language studies on young ones. Obviously, due to this additional language burden, lesser portion of student’s learning capacity (brain space and time) is available for other core subjects, compared to the rest of the world.

Our constitutional guardians, while giving prominence to Hindi, took the wise decision not to make it a compulsory national language. They also recognized major regional languages equally while retaining English for official work considering it practical. The problem today is we do not know how to make the best use of this arrangement.

It appears successive ruling powers and its learned policy makers do not know about the respective strengths, applicability and use of English, Hindi and regional languages. They are also unable to give any national vision and clear development paths for these languages, let alone taking responsibility of adapting, improving and applying Hindi and other regional languages in professional higher studies and in work places.

Hindi, as we know today, is relatively modern construct and was actually manufactured by the British colonizer (Sanskrit + Hindustani) as a working language to replace Urdu (Farsi + Hindustani) used by the previous Mughal rulers. Later it was adopted by northern states to replace various Hindustani dialects spoken there. In comparison, some of our classical regional languages are more ancient and richer in many aspects. So, Hindi can’t really claim supremacy on such lofty ground.

On the other hand, Hindi is spoken by largest number of Indians and its backers dominate political spheres. But the problem is while they often try to “impose” it on non-Hindi speaker, without doing much in building high quality Hindi language educational eco-system by strengthening the language and widening its applications. But how extensively Hindi is actually used in higher education and professional work in the Northern states? Government run Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi University had discontinued its engineering graduate programme due to lack of students and infrastructure. In its first two years only 11 students took admission, against a yearly intake capacity of 180. Indeed, today average northerners’ propensity to send their offspring to English medium schools or do professional higher studies in English is no less than anywhere else in the country.

Now, in non-Hindi states stories are similar, except that Hindi also is jostling for space. For example, West Bengal government is finding it very difficult to introduce Bengali even as an “optional” subject in English or Hindi medium schools. At the same time, while claiming rich language heritages, non-Hindi states have also failed to adapt, apply and expand meaningful use of their own regional languages to create a desirable level of vernacular eco-system for higher studies and professional applications.

Today, while Hindi and regional languages jostle for space in schools, people have figured out that both are of no use for STEM and social science studies in nation’s elite higher educational institutions. As a result, most are flocking towards all kinds of private English medium schools, now sprouting all over due to government policy of privatization in school level education. Meanwhile, due to government neglect, corruption, and political interference both quality and importance of vernacular government sponsored schools have been deteriorating, further discouraging serious students to admit.

A Self-Defeating Game

So, English has become the ultimate winner in this self-defeating game. Obviously, our perception about English is actually precipitated due to colonial hangover and elite sections continuing to use English to further strengthening their positions in various ways even after Independence. Today, commoners tilt has further enhanced due to increasing opportunities in IT sector with clients from abroad. Technical clerks have replaced the desirable British merchant office clerks of the past.

Around the world, however, there is ample proof that national languages are good enough for social and technical developments. All non-English speaking developed countries in the world including Japan, China and Korea in Asia use national languages in their education system, so that students can concentrate on core domain subject learning. The result of such choice and efforts is for all to see.

Naturally, priorities in the Indian work places have been changing. Today’s employers, be it public sector enterprises, research organizations or Indian owned private sector corporate have become more practical and ask more for core domain competence and human relation qualities. UPSC allows use of vernacular languages in its civil service exams and interviews. Even in IT services, if your software development skill or domain knowledge is great, chances are employers would try to fit you with some extra efforts. Moreover, spoken Hindi and regional languages mingle more confidently with English in modern Indian work places.

Indeed, in science, technology, engineering, medical or any other professions basic English language proficiency is good enough, which can be acquired even if English is learned as second or third language, if taught sincerely. Current feeling of English being indispensable comes more due to absence of viable vernacular language alternative in higher, and now increasingly, in school education systems.

As such, if use of Indian languages is national development priority, urgent initiatives are to be taken to improve the Indian language eco-system in higher education, which so far remains the most neglected area.

Vernacular Triumph

In the not-so-distant past, it was actually better in this respect. Even in our childhood, studying in vernacular medium and government schools were not only common but often desirable. Students of such schools used to be very strong in science and other core subjects and always did better in competitive entrance examinations. Past generations faced no difficulty in any types of jobs here or abroad.

During that time, there were also some patriotic private initiatives in using Indian languages in STEM fields. In West Bengal, for example, world famous scientists like Meghnad Saha and S. N Bose helped creating Bengal Science Society, which still publishes scientific books and magazines in Bengali. Similarly, Electrical Engineering books written in Bengali by S. R. Chakraborty has been in good circulation in WB, Tripura and Bangladesh since the last six decades.

In the current demand-supply situation, however, we cannot expect private initiative or investment in rebuilding vernacular or Hindi medium based education system. If central and state governments want to propagate Hindi and regional language use in education and work, they must take the lead and the responsibility of strengthening vernacular education eco system and rebuilding related institutions and work in mission mode to achieve it. That should include improving government sponsored vernacular schools, publishing text books for higher level of education and teacher’s training. They must also ensure that vernacular students face no discrimination or disadvantages in higher education admissions and job recruitment process. The last one has always been the hidden root cause of ordinary people’s language dilemma.

Indian Languages, be it Hindi or other regional are the biggest part of our identity. But they have to be improved and adapted for the real-life professions. Any language slowly withers if not widely used in all spheres of life. The time has come for less political jingoism and more state efforts to improve language adaptation in higher education.

Until then, the three-language formula in school will remain what it is – a political and administrative balancing act - at the cost of additional burden on hapless young students.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Navi Mumbai. Views personal.)

A Notice Is Not a Wall

Three Languages, One English-Dominated Reality

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