Sunday, 13 Oct, 2024
Building collapses are an annual occurrence in the financial capital of the country, especially during the monsoon
Last week, atleast 19 people were killed and several injured after a four-storey building collapsed in the Kurla area of Mumbai. This was the third major building collapse incident in the metropolis in June. Before this, a slab of a two-storey industrial structure had collapsed in the Chembur killing two and injuring 19 others. On June 9, a three-storey residential building collapsed in suburban Bandra in which one person was killed and 18 suffered injuries.
Building collapses are an annual occurrence in the financial capital of the country, especially during the monsoon. According to RTI data gathered by NGO Adhikar Foundation, 3,945 structures fell in the city between 2013 and 2019, killing at least 300 people and injuring 1,146. Between 1970 and 2018, 815 people have lost their lives in building crashes. Many of these buildings were 50-100 years old and were in depleted state. As per estimates, there are more than 14,000 buildings in Mumbai that are over 50 years old and which, due to age-related instability and lack of maintenance, are at risk of collapse.
Every year before monsoon, the local Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, or MHADA releases a list of dangerous, dilapidated buildings in the city. According to the list issued in April 2022, as many as 337 buildings in Mumbai have been identified as dilapidated or in the C1 category, requiring immediate vacating of the structure followed by demolition. As many as 163 out of 337 buildings were in the western suburbs of Mumbai, followed by 104 in the eastern suburbs, and the remaining in south Mumbai.
According to BMC rules, residents living in buildings that are over 30 years old have to carry out structural audits. Those falling in the C1 list and can’t be repaired have to be vacated. However, many housing societies move to court or appeal to civic body's technical advisory committee (TAC) stalling demolition drives. BMC says around 73 cases are still in court and the civic body cannot take action against these buildings. Of the rest, only 107 buildings have been vacated, tenants are staying the rest.
In case of ceesed building (whose maintenance rights are with MHADA), they are provided alternate accommodation in transit camps yet many refuse to shift. This is majorly due to them not finding these transit camps at their preferred locations and a fear that once they vacate their homes, redevelopment will be stuck, and they will lose ownership of their homes. Many housing societies do not have conveyance of the land thus finding it difficult to find a redeveloper to redevelop their old buildings. Sometimes, the tenants and owners also clash over the redevelopment rights further dragging such projects for way too long.
Mumbai is likely paying the price for having too many planning authorities with overlapping remits, which means the pressing problem of dangerous, dilapidated structures is buried in layers of bureaucracy. Since the past several years, several committees and court orders & observations have asked the Maharashtra government machinery to find a solution to end this problem, but the solution looks far for over.
