DEADLY DISASTER IN DELHI - SAVERA

The collapse of a five-storey building in Delhi killed 68 people and injured over 200 others on 15 November. This was the sixth such incident of death and injury resulting from building collapses in the capital in the past four years. The present one was the deadliest. This one incident exposes the precarious existence that this city’s working people lead. It also throws stark light on the culture of neglect that is practiced by the affluent sections towards the poor.

Jatin Haldar is waiting at a government hospital to claim the body of his 16-year-old son who died before his eyes. “I had just returned from work and was parking my cycle-rickshaw, when I heard a loud noise. Nearly an hour later I was able to spot my son and seven-year-old daughter. An iron rod had entered his stomach. I first rescued my daughter and then rushed towards Sapan. One of the policemen pulled out the iron rod and my son died on the spot. I rushed him to Lok Nayak (Hospital), but he was declared brought dead,” he says. His other two sons are admitted in another hospital with head injuries.

This heart rending scene is being repeated many times in hospitals and morgues of the capital since the night of 15 November 2010. Sometimes it is fathers weeping for their sons, sometimes it is grandmothers crying over dead children. There is even a 12-year old boy with wide eyes staring at his mother, holding her hand, as she wails in grief. Her husband, the boy’s father, has died.

Almost all of the 250 people staying in the 5-storey tenement in Lalita Park, a residential colony in east Delhi, were migrant workers from Bihar and West .Bengal. They worked as rickshaw pullers, domestic helps, and in small manufacturing units, one of which was located in the building itself. They had come from distant villages in search of jobs, as survival is very difficult in the villages. Little did they know that death can strike in a million ways in our national Capital.

On 15 November, the building collapsed, killing 68 people. It turns out now that since the heavy rains this year, water kept seeping into its basement. The colony is located barely a kilometer away from the Yamuna river. While bunds prevent direct flooding, the groundwater table has risen considerably since the rains. This has weakened the foundations of buildings.

But the story goes much deeper than this. The owner of the building is a known criminal, who has earlier been arrested for – adulteration of cement! He had illegally constructed several floors and additional rooms, presumably using substandard material. He was known to extort money with threats, and could not bear to hear any complaints. Reports had been made earlier to the Municipal Corporation and other authorities about the danger from water seepage and irregularities in construction, but the authorities just turned a blind eye to all these, thereby just inviting such a disaster.

The building housed not only families but some handicrafts and sewing units also. Workers aged 12 to 22 used to work there, and many even stayed on the premises. Each floor had 30-40 people living on it. Some of the families had come to stay there on rent after their jhuggies (tenements) were uprooted from the nearby slum of Yamuna Pushta.

“We came here with our entire family of 15, last Diwali and we had rented two rooms. We had been relocated in Ghewra (a village at the outskirts of Delhi) but since there are few avenues for making a living there, we decided to move here. Several other neighbours also shifted at the same time,” says Deepali Haldar. She came to the city twenty years ago from Murshidabad seeking employment. Now she works as a maid in the area while her husband is a rickshaw-puller. One of her sons was killed in the building collapse, while four other family members are seriously injured.

This is the fate of common working people in this city, which recently spent an estimated Rs.70,000 crores on holding the Commonwealth Games. It has no time, money or space for over 60% of its 1.5 crore population, which lives in substandard houses and works at a pittance to create and maintain the wealth of the metropolis, and to cater to the comfort of well off residents of the city.

Source: www.citucenre.org/