The Union home ministry has shown purposefulness in asking the Municipal Corporation of Delhi for a report on the sudden collapse of a five-storeyed building in a slum area in East Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar earlier this week, which caused the death of about 70 labourers who lived in that hellhole. Many are still trapped in the debris and

the fatalities could be higher. An unconscionably large number of poor families have also been seriously injured. This could mean the impairment for life, in a single incident which is neither an industrial accident nor a natural calamity, of a significant number of daily wage earners. So massive has been the tragedy that the National Disaster Management Authority has had to step in. In some ways this makes the episode unique.
The home ministry’s action suggests that the Centre is alive to the sorry reality that the rampant corruption in civic governance, which allowed such a building to be in existence in the first place, is likely to be an all-India phenomenon. The home ministry’s directive, one hopes, is also indicative of the fact that the Centre will take the further step to alert all state governments to look into the question of hurriedly constructed buildings in major urban centres within their jurisdiction, especially those that house the migrant poor who flock to big cities in search of employment in construction, road building and other largescale civil works (as was evident during the recent Commonwealth Games). Followup measures by the Centre that might be of practical value to the state governments in dealing with the problem are also called for.
A large number of the daily-wage earners killed in the Laxmi Nagar tragedy happened to be from West Bengal. But they could just as well have been from other places. Cross-country livelihood-seeking migration of the poorest (since core agriculture cannot sustain a rising rural population, and agro-industries are generally absent) has been a reality for long. With the expansion of urbanisation as the economy expands, provision must be made to house the poor in a hygienic and safe environment, and not throw them into the embrace of real estate sharks — whose numbers are rising in direct proportion to housing shortages in cities — that was evidently the case at Laxmi Nagar. This is a pressing need. So is the decongestion of major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru so that better amenities for all, not excluding the poor, can be supplied. In this respect we have fallen behind many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not for a moment should we lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming bulk of employment in India is in the unorganised sector which receives the least funding for the provision of the basic necessities of life — health, housing, schooling, even when ill-paid jobs can be had.
The Union home ministry might have done well to ask the MCD and the Delhi government for an action taken report on the arrests made. While never before have so many people been killed in a single incident of this nature in the nation’s capital, illegal structures in Delhi — mostly of faulty design and resting on shaky foundations — could run into lakhs, and many of these can cave in without warning. This points to the flouting of land-use and building regulations by the land mafia on a gigantic scale in collusion with officials. Shockingly, the Laxmi Nagar building housed residential tenements, factories and workshops. Even as its basement remained submerged for weeks, its owner — who has now been arrested — received permission to build a fifth floor. Let not the MCD fool anyone that only buildings near the Yamuna riverbed are at risk and should be inspected for repair or demolition.