In a terrible tragedy on July 27, 2024, three young IAS aspirants drowned in floodwaters that deluged the basement of their coaching centre in Delhi’s crowded Rajinder Nagar area. The basement was being illegally operated as a library. A magisterial probe conducted in the aftermath of the incident highlighted grave regulatory lapses on the part of the building and works departments of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) as well as the management of the centre. Despite several reports of misuse and legal violations in previous years, no action had been taken.
This, however, is neither the first nor a rare instance of human lives falling prey to the callousness and regulatory failure of authorities. Consider the past few months alone. On May 26, 2024, seven new-born infants were killed in a devastating fire at the paediatric ward in a Delhi hospital. On May 25th, 27 lives were snuffed out in a nasty fire in a sprawling gaming area in Gujarat’s Rajkot. Intermittent smaller disasters have been a regular across rapidly and haphazardly urbanising cities in India.
The basic reasons behind all such incidents are the same: illegal constructions, rampant flouting of building bye-laws and disregard for fire safety rules. As in the Delhi building, lack of urban planning has resulted in haphazard constructions, often blocking drainage and sewerage lines and eating up water bodies. This leads to urban flooding or flash floods with fatal consequences, as we have just seen.
These tragedies, after they occur, usually invite panic-stricken, knee jerk responses from the state authorities, who take no time in tracking down and sealing properties not following building and fire safety laws. In Delhi, too, we find that 122 coaching centres, libraries and schools running illegally from basements have already been sealed, with the Mayor assuring of continuing action against buildings that have violated the Corporation’s building byelaws.
But history shows that after such initial crackdowns, things return to business as usual, until the next tragedy strikes. Gujarat presents several stark examples.
Disregard for human life – a common malaise
In 2019, a devastating fire at a commercial building in Surat (Takshashila Arcade) saw 22 children burnt alive as they were trapped in a makeshift illegal structure on the top of the building without any fire safety measures and with only one entry and exit, which got blocked.
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Such incidents should not really surprise us, given that urban India has less than 40% of the fire stations than required. This came out in a 2018 joint study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry and global risk management firm Pinkerton. Pinkerton and FICCI’s subsequent risk assessment reports, including the last one in 2023, continued to include fire safety among areas of high risk in cities.
In 2020, the 15th Finance Commission noted with concern that India’s firefighting infrastructure is antiquated and needs an overhaul.
Evidence of this emerged the same year (2020), when Gujarat saw at least eight fire incidents at COVID-19 hospitals, and then again one in 2021. As many as 31 people lost their lives and around 150 others suffered injuries in these incidents.
However, the concern here is not just about the short shrift given to the serious inadequacies in the country’s fire infrastructure. The malaise runs deeper — in rapidly and haphazardly urbanising India, where human lives come cheap.
The Gujarat model of (non) governance!
If at least 31% of all Indians live in the urban areas, Gujarat has 42.6% of its population living in its cities – nearly 90% of them live in Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot and Vadodara and their peripheries. Gujarat arguably mirrors the state of affairs in most cities in the country quite closely. Perhaps more so because Gujarat is urbanising faster than most states and the state is often tom-tommed as a model of good governance and development in the country.
With a high rate of urbanisation and increasing inter-state as well as intra-state migration, cities are bursting at the seams leading to haphazard and illegal construction activity at a frenetic pace. Even the outskirts of these cities are witness to rampant and massive construction, often a good four to five years before town planning schemes even reach these peri-urban areas. In such a scenario, flouting of fire safety norms and building bye-laws becomes common practice. In Gujarat, that has been the trend during the last three decades.
What makes the situation worse is that the state government has itself created a legal loophole, in the guise of the Gujarat Regularisation of Unauthorised Development (Impact fee for regularisation of illegal properties) Act (GRUDA). Under this legislation, originally enacted in 2000, the owners of such constructions could get them legalised by paying “impact fees”.
This was originally conceived as only a one-time arrangement, since the number of illegal constructions was found to be so high that demolishing all of them would create a rehabilitation crisis. But the ‘impact fee’ never remained a one-time facility, and became a norm with multiple extensions.
When the legislation got its second term in 2011, there were an estimated 25 lakh unauthorised structures waiting to be legalised. Again in 2017, when the state government introduced the Gujarat Land Revenue (Amendment) Act, it was to legalise 7 lakh properties erected on land meant for agricultural purposes.
Read more: Erring builders and officials not on radar of CMDA Monitoring Committee
Too little, too late
At any given time, the local municipal corporation, especially in the four major cities of Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot, begins action against such constructions, it immediately issues notices easily to some 10,000-odd structures. The very fact that this takes just about a few hours leaves little room for doubt that the civic body already carries a list of such buildings.
Soon after the 2019 devastating Takshashila Arcade fire, which the then Chief Secretary JN Singh had described as a “bad wake-up call”, the Gujarat government cracked down on illegal structures across the State. The government immediately ordered fire safety audit of 9,965 buildings across the State and issued notices to 9,395 of them for violating fire safety rules!
Similar scenes were witnessed during raids at gaming zones and other such structures, which were sealed for want of fire safety infrastructure and illegal construction, following the recent incident.
In most cases, any action takes place only after a reprimand from the Gujarat High Court. Not surprising that at any given time there is always a public interest litigation (PIL) in the court regarding irregularities in construction or safety violations.
The first high court order about implementing fire safety came way back in a 1997 case of fire at a commercial building in Ahmedabad’s plush Navrangpura area. This was in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) by a rights organisation, Lok Adhikar Sangh. The Lok Adhikar Sangh, represented by veteran lawyer Girish Patel, also filed the PIL in the backdrop of the Uphaar Cinema fire tragedy in New Delhi’s Green Park area on June 13 1997, which left 59 people dead.
The order in the 1997 PIL came in 2000 where the high court asked authorities to ensure that fire safety and building laws were effectively implemented before issuing building use (BU) permissions. Yet, clearly nothing much has changed.
A report on the Delhi coaching centre incident prepared by the district magistrate G Sudhakar has clearly revealed that the completion-cum-occupancy certificate for the property was issued without a fire safety certificate. In fact, this came to light in a survey conducted back in August 2023 on all such buildings in the area, following a fire incident in another centre. But despite the alert on misuse of property at the Rajinder Nagar building at that time, the basement had not been sealed and no follow-up action had been taken.
In this context, the observations by a bench of Justice Biren Vaishnav and Justice Devan Desai in a suo motu petition by the high court after the Rajkot gaming zone fire are poignant and capture the ugly truth of the prevailing situation: “Who will take the drastic steps (to ensure that safety laws are followed)? Honestly speaking, we do not have faith in the State machinery now. After four years of orders passed by this court, this is the sixth incident that has happened. They only want lives to be lost, only then they trigger the machinery.”