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Monsoon preparedness: PMC on weak foundation with pending survey and structural audit
Monsoon 2019 claimed 23 lives in two wall collapse incidents.
Pune The 2019 flash floods and two wall collapse incidents in Pune at the beginning of monsoon claimed 23 people in July. The tragedy forced the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to conduct a structural audit of all retaining walls and put in place other preventive measures.
The civic administration, however, seems to have learnt little from its past mistakes. The PMC engineering department staff are yet to make a physical visit of boundary or fencing walls across the city.
Seventeen residents died and three were injured after a portion of the Alcon Stylus residential building compound wall came crashing down on the temporary shacks of labourers located next to the highrise residential complex after heavy rainfall. Among the dead included four children and a woman. A district official said the wall crashed owing to heavy rains.
Neither survey nor structural audit of both the residential complex and the neighbouring constructions was completed by the PMC, activists alleged.
A building permissions department superintending engineer officer, on condition of anonymity, said that the survey could not be completed because of the ongoing Covid-19 situation as majority of the staff is engaged in the contagion prevention work.
According to the department, the threat is less this year compared to 2019 as many migrant labourers have left for their native places because of the coronavirus spread.
The civic administration also took a far-reaching decision of shifting labourers located at 450 construction sites to safe places after their settlements were found to pose threat to their lives.
In the second incident which took place in Ambegaon last year, six labourers died due to a wall collapse incident after heavy rainfall. The civic administration is yet to conduct the mandatory survey of the dangerous fencing walls which it claimed to complete before the onset of monsoon.
RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar said, “PMC does not show any accountability in discharging its duties. It makes announcements to pacify residents during crisis and then backs out. It is a mere lip service as the PMC is not performing its duty of making life safe for its people. The negligence should be probed and PMC’s irresponsibility should be exposed.”
After these incidents, the labour commissioner’s office conducted a detailed survey of under-construction residential labour sites for over 90 days and registered more than 15,000 workers. The move was aimed at providing them safety and benefits under the various sections of the central and state labour act. However, the process fizzled out with the passage of time, labour activists claim.
Senior labour leader BJ Kerkar said, “The PMC failed to keep its word and endangered the lives of residents and labours working at different construction sites. We will be writing to the PMC commissioner about the non-conduct of the survey and lack of further action by the civic body.” Kerkar demanded that the PMC and labour department must jointly carry out the work in the larger interests of residents and labour community. PMC commissioner Shekhar Gaikwad could not be reached for his comments.
Pune MP Girish Bapat’s media office informed that he would not be commenting on the issue as the work was directly related to the PMC and it was a policy decision by the administration.
Man-made tragedy?
June 29, 2019
Seventeen people, including four children and two women, were killed while two others were injured when a compound wall of Alcon Stylus housing society in Kondhwa collapsed on the makeshift shanties adjacent to it. The police arrested two real estate developers Vivek Sunil Agarwal (32) and Vipul Sunil Agarwal (30) in connection with the wall collapse incident. The police had held the builders liable for wilfully neglecting the repair and strengthening of the retaining wall.
July 1, 2019
Six construction workers were killed in their sleep and four others injured when a boundary wall collapsed and buried their shanties in Pune’s Ambegaon on account of heavy rains in the city. The then Pune district collector had said that the nine-foot-high boundary wall collapsed mostly due to gushing waters and uprooted trees in the area had weakened its foundation. Victims were buried under the debris of the wall of an educational institute of Sinhgad Group.
