Eight persons were killed and eleven were injured when an under-construction four-storey building collapsed at Sahakar Nagar in Pune on Monday afternoon.
Most of the victims were construction workers and their families and were living in the precarious structure. Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) said that the building that stood on Taljai hillock had been illegally built.
The deceased include six men, two women and one child. Three men, four women and four children were rescued from the rubble. However, they all have suffered major or minor injuries. Rescue operations continued till late into the night and at the time of going to press one person was still feared to be trapped in the debris.
The place where the incident took place has several illegal structures that have been haphazardly built. “The building was largely occupied by the construction workers and their families. Another family had rented out a different portion of the building. A team from the National Disaster Response Force equipped with rescue tools were pressed into service along with the fire-brigade,” Mahesh Pathak, municipal commissioner of Pune told this newspaper on the phone.
On September 1, the PMC had issued the demolition notice to its developers of the collapsed building. “We had issued a notice to its owners. It was because of the Ganesh festival that the police was busy with bandobast and the PMC’s demolition activity had to be stalled. For the past three months, we have served notices to 2,300 illegal constructions out of which 880 have been demolished. We have lodged a complaint against the owners,” said Mr Pathak.
Local corporator Shivlal Bhosale alleged that he had complained about the illegal structure to the municipal corporation but no action was initiated. Residents said that the local political leaders support illegal structures and low quality materials are used to build them.