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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.)

When ‘No’ is Not an Answer

The Pune murder case, in which a young man was allegedly killed by his fiancée and her partner, has become an Indian cause célèbre. While the crime is cruel and unforgivable, it begs the question why? If she did not want to marry the man, she could have just said no. The accused – Siya Goyal – is only 20 years old, according to reports, and had said she did not want to marry her fiancé. Socially, it opens up a much larger question that in many Indian families, even today, why is it so hard for a young woman to say no?


In theory, modern India celebrates women’s choice. Women study, work, travel, earn, lead teams, run companies and talk about empowerment. But inside the intimate spaces of family and marriage, choice can still be heavily negotiated, and sometimes quietly denied. 


A UN Women Discussion Paper (2023) provides a definitive, systemic breakdown of why modern progress fails to automatically grant women true personal agency. It highlights that individual choices regarding marriage, work, and bodily autonomy are actively bottlenecked by deep-seated social norms rather than a lack of legal rights, and globally, progress on gender equality is slow, has stalled or is backsliding.


Multidimensional Process

Women’s agency is the multidimensional process through which women formulate self-defined goals, hold self-efficacy to pursue them, and make strategic life choices. It is not merely an individual cognitive trait, but a relational capacity heavily mediated by formal institutions and informal social norms. True agency requires not just the freedom to make choices, but also the structural power to challenge and transform unequal gender hierarchies.


Main Vaapas Aaunga, set against the wounds of Partition, had a deeply disturbing family moment: the women of a displaced family are left behind in newly created Pakistan. The matriarch says no and resists as she sees the horror of what is being decided. But the patriarch decides. The men ensure that he is taken to India, even if on a makeshift stretcher. His body, his survival, his journey matter. The women’s fear, refusal, and fate are absorbed into the larger authority of the male decision. The scene stays with us because it reveals that while the women were present, they suffered the consequences of decisions they did not make.


Women’s agency is still most fragile at the points where society is most invested: marriage, sexuality, divorce, inheritance, motherhood, respectability, and family honour. The modern woman may be told she is free, but her freedom often comes with invisible clauses. Choose, but do not shame us. Work, but do not neglect the home. Speak, but do not sound angry. Leave, but only if the abuse is unbearable enough for others to certify. Say no, but be ready to explain it.


This is why cases of women killing husbands or fiancés receive such intense attention. They are shocking and they should be. Violence by women cannot be explained away as ‘rebellion’ or ‘helplessness.’ Men, too, are victims of intimate violence.


But we must be careful not to build a false equivalence. The data on gendered violence in India still tells a much larger and more persistent story of women being harmed inside homes, marriages and families. Crimes against women remain staggeringly high. A crime against a woman was registered every 71 seconds in India in 2024. Cruelty by husbands and relatives continues to be one of the largest categories of recorded crime against women. Globally, too, women are far more likely to be killed by intimate partners or family members than men are.


So, when a woman is accused of killing a man, we must condemn the crime without using it to erase the scale of violence against women. At the same time, we should not avoid the uncomfortable question it raises: what social routes do women have when they want to refuse a marriage, end an engagement or reject the life chosen for them?


No Agency

Agency is therefore not only an individual quality but also a social permission structure. It is created by families, institutions, laws, and economic independence. A woman has agency not only when she speaks but also when her speech changes the outcome.


This is why even powerful women are not free from gendered punishment. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently pushed back sharply against US President Donald Trump after he claimed she had sought a photograph with him. She exercised public agency: she rejected the humiliation and refused the script of female deference. And yet, Meloni herself has faced the circulation of fake, sexualised AI-generated images. Even when a woman occupies the highest office, the digital crowd knows how to drag her back to shame and humiliation.


Women may enter public life, but their image is still treated as available for violation.  From Partition homes to political offices, from arranged marriages to AI deepfakes, the pattern is not identical, but the question is connected: who gets to decide what happens to a woman’s life, body, reputation, and future? The answer should be obvious: she does.


We need families where a daughter’s ‘no’ is not treated as betrayal and where engagements are ended without shame. We need divorce to be seen not only as a failure, but sometimes as a survival. We need economic systems that allow women to leave without destitution. We need legal processes that are accessible before violence escalates. We need men to understand that rejection is not humiliation. And we need women to know that agency is not selfishness. A woman should not have to destroy herself, or anyone else, to escape a life she did not choose.


(The writer is an Associate Professor of Organisation and Leadership Studies at S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai. Views personal.)

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