Safety audit exercise falls short in Delhi

In the aftermath of Sunday’s building collapse at Satya Niketan, Delhi -- a city with more than 3

In the aftermath of Sunday’s building collapse at Satya Niketan, Delhi -- a city with more than 3.25 million residential buildings claimed to surveyed annually by the civic body -- is grappling with renewed concerns over structural safety. The challenge is particularly acute in a city where nearly two-thirds of residents are estimated to live in buildings constructed without adherence to building norms and which falls in Seismic Zone 4, classified as having a “high risk” of earthquakes.

On paper, that means each engineer would have to assess more than 13,000 buildings if the entire city were to undergo a structural safety audit.

Keeping these factors in mind, assessing millions of buildings would be a gargantuan task for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). But civic officials said the corporation does not have a dedicated mechanism or cell specialising in structural safety audits, nor permanent structural engineers on its rolls. Instead, structural audits are conducted by 249 third-party structural engineers empanelled by MCD.

On paper, that means each engineer would have to assess more than 13,000 buildings if the entire city were to undergo a structural safety audit.

The latest collapse prompted the Delhi government September 7 to announce a policy for structural audits of vulnerable buildings, but similar directives have been issued before with limited results.

In June 2020, following the intervention of the Delhi High Court, the three erstwhile municipal corporations had set a six-month deadline for obtaining structural safety certificates for high-risk buildings and older structures that predated the incorporation of seismic provisions into Delhi’s building bye-laws. But nearly six years later, the MCD has covered only a fraction of the properties identified under the court-mandated exercise.

Arpit Bhargava, the petitioner in the case, said compliance remained poor even among buildings identified by the civic body. “Accountability has to be fixed to prevent these avoidable deaths. The government and administration do not appear serious at all. They don’t even have enough empanelled structural engineers,” he said. “In 2019, the government had assured that a five-year action plan will be made. Then in 2020, the corporation fixed a six-month deadline for obtaining a structural safety certificate for high-risk buildings but nothing much changed on ground,” he added.

A senior MCD official involved in the court-mandated exercise said the scale of unauthorised construction made enforcement difficult. “In many cases we have issued notices but people do not respond. If we take harsh action like cutting power or water supply, it leads to a public outcry. The scale of the issue is very large and the problem is particularly stark in the Walled City and unauthorised colonies,” the official said.

The official suggested prioritising large assembly buildings, government offices, high-rise structures and old buildings for retrofitting.

MCD estimates prepared as part of its annual “dangerous building” survey put the total number of house buildings in Delhi at about 3.25 million structures. A large majority of the latter, officials said, were developed without adherence to building regulations.

The Tejendra Khanna Committee, set up in 2006 to examine unauthorised construction and misuse of premises, had estimated that 70-80% of structures had violated building norms.

MCD also faces a financial hurdle. Officials familiar with the process said a structural audit of a single small sized residential building can cost between ₹15,000 and ₹50,000 for basic assessment. MCD currently only relied on visual surveyes where only cracks or leaning walls are flagged. For a cash-strapped civic body already struggling to enforce building regulations, a city-wide audit would therefore require substantial additional funding. Last month, MCD sought an annual allocation of ₹60 crore from the Delhi government to strengthen enforcement against unauthorised construction in the city’s 1,511 unauthorised colonies.

Jagdish Mamgain, an urban planning expert and former MCD works committee chairman, said that MCD lacks both resources and political will to undertake a city-wide structural safety campaign. “After the Lalita Park collapse in 2010 (Delhi’s largest such tragedy), we realised there were no structural engineers and directions were issued to ramp up resources. Delhi still lacks an adequate mechanism to check the structural safety of buildings. There is no internal expertise and 249 empanelled engineers are mostly there to clear building plans for smaller plot size units. They are not even paid enough for this work. There are more than 7.4 million dwelling units in Delhi. It is not possible to cover them all but Delhi will have to prioritize certain types of buildings and put in adequate resources, money and expertise to implement it.”

Mamgain said that outsourcing structural safety is not the way forward. “Most of all credibility is missing from the process. If such buildings are owned by politicians, which beldar, junior engineer, or empanelled structural engineer can flag it for shortcomings? We need an independent credible mechanism for it.”