Mumbai Building Collapse Kills at Least 30

NEW DELHI - At least 30 people were killed and 69 injured when a building under construction in a town near Mumbai collapsed Thursday evening in an all-too-common case of illegal and shoddy construction ending in disaster.

Rescuers continued Friday to pull bodies from the rubble in Thane. The dead included 10 children and 8 women, according to media reports, as well as at least a dozen men, some of them construction workers.

Construction workers and their families often live in crude shacks at construction sites, exposing women and children to significant risks.

“Illegal construction is a major problem in the Thane area,” said Sandeep Malvi, public relations officer of Thane Municipal Corporation. “Each time we demolish a building, someone builds again. We demolish it, and they build.”

The price of land in many Indian cities has grown so high that contractors routinely build on public property - sometimes after bribing public officials. If enough buildings are built in a particular area and enough time passes, these makeshift settlements become politically impossible to demolish.

The collapsed building in Thane was built on protected forest land, according to Mr. Malvi. And because of the uncertainty of the endeavor, the quality of the construction is often very poor.

“Because these buildings come up so quickly, the quality is always very bad,” Mr. Malvi said.

Local police officials have filed murder charges against the builders, who have yet to be found.

Building collapses aren’t unusual in India because of unsafe and illegal constructions tacked onto structures. In 2010, a five-story tenement collapsed in New Delhi, killing at least 64 people, mostly migrant workers.

A government study, published in 1998, noted that, ”The number of unsafe buildings is increasing every day.”

The problem is not a lack of construction standards, just an indifference to them, the study concluded.
But even high-quality construction projects defy contracting norms that are enforced in places like the United States. For instance, New Delhi bans large cement trucks from entering much of the city during the day. The result is that concrete for even very large homes is often made in a batch process on site, which can result in substandard buildings with significant structural flaws.