The callousness with which the basic principles of putting up a building have been ignored is a pointer to the scant regard Indians seem to have for their laws. The builders’ mafia has always lived by its own rules, which means it flouts every known regulation to serve the huge demand for dwellings in urban India, now expanding like never before as waves of migrants move from the villages to towns and cities in search of livelihood.
The Thane building collapse is yet another tolling of a giant warning bell on how little we care for safety in the sardines-in-a-can experience of the mega cities. What happened in a Mumbai suburb could happen just about anywhere as the urban crush grows. At what cost this unfettered urban growth is being undertaken is a measure of the scant value we put on lives.
The poorest are the ones hit most by the terrible need to live in any condition, however dehumanising, just to exist as millions of others in the shanty mini-towns and massive slums of our metros, suffering as much from fires that sweep through them in summer as from building collapses. Building laws are supposed to be strictest in the cities, but this is where the greatest corruption gnaws at the heart of the nation.
The payout is measured scientifically, by the square foot, as pockets of bureaucrats and their political bosses get lined. And those who rail at the rampant corruption make it such a political battle as to always ask for the head of a chief minister without realising that the problem is not to do with the head as with the whole body of corruption regardless of who is in power.
The brazen manner in which all regulations were flouted — forest, agricultural and city planning — to make such townships of shoddy buildings possible betrays the fact that the only master in the building trade is money. Governments cannot solve the problem by taking up construction of dwellings for the less-well-off because the construction industry, which thrives on the contract system, would simply deliver substandard buildings that would fall even quicker.
The horrific toll — 72 and counting — taken by the Thane building collapse should serve to wake the conscience of builders as otherwise we would be fighting a losing battle against the politician-civic-authority-builder nexus. The urban jungle has to be mapped and studied in detail to enumerate the dilapidated and dangerous buildings. City regulators are the ones who should wake up soonest because they preside over the concrete jungle.