Thane building collapse: 56 dead, 60 injured

Several Still Missing; All Seven Builders Absconding; CM Orders Probe

Nitin Yeshwantrao TNN

Thane: Mumbra in Thane district became the focus of widespread public outrage on Friday as the toll from the Thursday collapse of a sevenstorey building swelled to 56 fatalities and 60 injured. Moreover, it has emerged that the building was constructed in violation of every norm in the rulebook.
    According to the civic body, among the 56 dead were 19 children, 21 men and 16 women. A few people were still missing till late Friday though about 250 rescue workers laboured through the day, searching for survivors and bodies in the sizeable heap of concrete and steel.
    Till late in the evening, the rescuers – including a team of the National Disaster Response Force – had managed to pull out 116 people, 60 of them alive.
    And in the first round of punitive action, the government suspended deputy commissioner of Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) Deepak Chavan for “dereliction of duty” and senior inspector K P Naik of Shil-Daighar police station for “colluding” with the seven builders. The seven developers – including a former scrap dealer, Jamir Qureshi, and Salim Shaikh – were booked for endangering lives and culpable homicide. All seven are absconding.
    Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, who visited the site of the tragedy, ordered a probe and announced compensation of Rs 2 lakh to the next of kin of the deceased and Rs 50,000 to the injured.
    Locals alleged that substandard material was employed in the construction of the seven-storey building that was commenced in February and raised in mere three months. Worse still, the developers appropriated private forest land and tribal land where construction is forbidden, did not obtain an occupancy certificate from the municipal corporation and, according to reports, had no approved plan.
    To make official demolition proceedings tough, the developers made construction workers and autorickshaw drivers’ families take up free, but temporary, residence in the building as each floor came up. Twenty-five tenements on five storeys were complete and the sixth and seventh floors were under construction. The developers intended to sell the apartments, admeasuring 175 sq ft on average, at Rs 1,100 to Rs 1,400 per sq ft. They planned to build six to eight such unauthorised buildings in the area.
    A civic engineer said the Thursday accident was waiting to happen since the building was built on a marshy plot and the foundation depth was about 8ft instead of the 30-35ft required in such soil conditions