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Three years on, safety audit by Municipal Corporation of Gurugram up in the air
The district administration directed the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) to conduct a special survey to identify unsafe structures across the city
Three years ago, when two buildings – one in Ullawas village and another in Sector 13-- collapsed, the district administration directed the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) to conduct a special survey to identify unsafe structures across the city.
The MCG, however, decided to hand off the survey to a less-than-qualified agency a year ago, much to the consternation of residents, who are especially unhappy in the aftermath of the ceiling collapse incident at Chintels Paradiso on February 10.
In January 2019, an illegal newly constructed three-storey building collapsed in Ullawas village, leading to the death of seven people.
Just three months later, a one-storey building in Sector 13 collapsed, but no injuries were reported as the building owner had closed his cosmetic shop just 15 minutes before the incident.
In the Ullawas incident, the building owner was getting a fourth floor constructed, and the lintel had been added just a day before the structure collapsed. In the Sector 13 incident, an under-construction basement weakened the structural integrity of the adjoining one-storey building, causing it to crumble.
With the civic body failing to undertake the survey, the Haryana Human Rights Commission pulled up the MCG in October 2020, following which the then commissioner Vinay Pratap Singh formed teams of engineering wing officials and set a 15-day deadline to complete the task.
However, instead of carrying out the survey themselves or hiring an expert agency to conduct it, the MCG turned to a private agency that was already conducting a property tax survey for the taxation wing, asking it to undertake the survey simultaneously. “The survey was conducted by workers from the agency who had no technical skills for the task. They only surveyed the buildings externally and failed to investigate their internal structure. In addition, the survey also primarily covered only structures that were in Old Gurgaon or were added after the completion of the last property survey in 2012,” said a senior MCG official in the property tax wing.
The data collected as part of the survey was compiled and submitted to the engineering wing for perusal in December 2021, said officials.
According to superintending engineer Vivek Gill, the report submitted by the property tax surveyor said that 183 buildings were found to be unsafe. “Following issuance of notices to owners of the buildings in January 2022, at least 72 buildings have been repaired and their owners have got new building plan approvals from the MCG. Around 80 buildings are still unsafe and their owners have been served fresh notices, while 31 more such buildings are yet to be verified by engineers.”
Gill said that the owners of 80 dangerous buildings have been given 45 days to make repairs, failing which the MCG will first disconnect their water and sewerage connections and later seal their buildings.
Another senior MCG official from the engineering wing justified the decision of the civic body. “The original pan-city survey never took off as we did not have the resources to do it ourselves. In 2019, we tried to hire an expert agency for the task. However, we could not get any firms with any prior experience in the matter,” the official said.
The collapse of a portion of a tower at the Chintels Paradiso condominium in Sector 109 on February 10 has once again brought the issue of unsafe buildings to the fore.
Residents of Chintels Paradiso had been complaining about structural issues in their buildings since 2018 on social media, just a year before MCG’s original survey was supposed to commence. In the aftermath of the incident, the Gurgaon Citizens’ Council (GCC), an umbrella body of residents’ welfare associations across the city, held a meeting with at least 30 representatives of different RWAs, in which the topic of MCG’s original audit was also discussed. “If the MCG had conducted the safety audit in time, the Chintels Paradiso collapse could have been averted,” said Dhruv Bansal, a GCC spokesperson.
Urban planners also reiterated this point, stating that the creation of expert teams for conducting building surveys is critical to prevent such incidents. “Formulation of expert teams or committees for building surveys is a must,” said Nilanjana Dasgupta Sur, assistant professor of urban planning at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi.
