Mumbai: In 10 years, fire brigade got 3,000+ house collapse calls

MUMBAI: In the last one decade, Mumbai Fire Brigade has received 3,313 calls regarding a building or its parts having collapsed. More than 200 people have died in these incidents. While most of these structures were old and dilapidated, some were illegally altered or constructed.

The highest number of house collapse calls (392) were received in 2019-20. This fiscal, till June, 72 such calls were received by the fire brigade.Any building, wall, hutment, boundary wall, slab collapse are reported as house collapse in fire brigade records; crashes due to fire are recorded separately.
There are nearly 15,000 cessed buildings in the city which due to years of neglect and tenant-landlord disputes are at risk of collapse. Owing to policy failure and government apathy, the residents continue to live in these shaky structures as they fear losing their rights to their homes if they move out. For instance, 22 families from Kanaiya Bhuvan on Shraddhanand Road in Vile Parle (E) complained to the Prime Minister’s Office that in 2019, the BMC razed their building after declaring it dilapidated and unsafe for habitation and now they were homeless as redevelopment was st-uck owing to a dispute with the landlord. Many middleman-cum-builders have approached the tenants offering nominal amount to transfer their tenancy rights in their name.
Utsal Karani, secretary of Janhit Manch, said there is a trust deficit between tenants, landlords and developers. “Landlords are looking for distress sale and tenants are reluctant to move out of their dilapidated homes as they know they will never get a reconstructed home. The government has done nothing to promote decent housing especially in the suburbs,” Karani said.
Activist Chandrashekhar Prabhu said research shows that when such a redevelopment project is executed by a private developer, all original tenants are never rehoused in the new building. “Earlier, there was at least a semblance of fairness as consent of 70% of tenants was required to carry out redevelopment. Now, the consent strength has been brought down to 51%, yet tenants do not agree for redevelopment preferring to stay in old and dilapidated buildings.”
The redevelopment policy has, in fact, brought a windfall for developers and politicians who help in evicting tenants, Prabhu claimed. In the last 30 years, around 2,000 buildings have been rebuilt by Mhada and 2,000 by private developers. “There are 15,000 old and dilapidated buildings in the island city and the pace of redev-elopment shows it will take 200 years for all of them to be redeveloped. The scheme, in its pr-esent form, needs to be scrapped and a pro-people scheme needs to be framed,” he said.