Delhi urges for safe housing than legal housing
Delhi: The Delhi government has recently cleared a layout plan of East Azad Nagar in order to regularise illegal settlement.
Just one day before the collapse of an illegal building in Thane that killed 74 persons, the Delhi government had cleared the layout plan of this colony. The last time when Delhi’s illegal colonies were legalised was decades ago in 1977.
With the fresh approval of layout plan, the residents of the colony can now get their building plans approved by paying a fixed amount of penalty for all the building violations, develop new buildings or make some alterations to the existing ones and sell properties.
The layouts were designed with enough space for roads, parks and a school, said officials. But later they were unofficially developed with tightly packed houses, without any space for providing public facilities. If roads or parks have to be provided then they are left with no other way than demolishing buildings.
Most of the constructions in the unauthorised colonies of Delhi are built on weak foundations with very poor load-bearing capacity. One can see four or five-storey wafer-thin structures come up just within a couple of months. If a building starts tilting, only then attention is given to it. But in most cases, the buildings collapse leading to deaths and injuries to many. In 2012, a block of flats in east Delhi’s Lalita Park, an “unauthorised regularised” colony, came down like a pack of cards killing 71 people.
The Vulnerability Atlas of India has reported that there are around 92 percent of buildings in Delhi that have moderate to high damage risks from an earthquake. Large portions of the densely populated east and southeast Delhi extending up to Noida and Faridabad fall under seismic zone IV. Adding to this, the foundations of constructions in most parts of outer Delhi are being affected by the high salinity levels of the groundwater.
Around one-third of Delhi residents pathetically live in illegal settlements. However, the rest are not necessarily safer than them. An estimate states that for every legal construction in Delhi, there are two being built illegally. Such illegal constructions, which are mostly poor in quality, are democratically spread across slums, unauthorised colonies, middle-class neighbourhoods and even upscale gated-communities.
It is commonly seen in a city like Delhi that small buyers bribe officials and somehow obtain permissions to turn single or two-floor self-constructed houses into multi-storey structures. In order to increase carpet area, most of them prefer to build thin walls. Despite the poor construction quality, most buyers are happy to get a permanent address.
The National Building Code has detailed specifications for all types of constructions and compliance is mandatory to obtain a completion certificate of a building. But the homeowners did not care to follow the norms since 2011 when the government revoked its order which had forbidden registration of properties which do not possess structural safety certificate.
It is very clear that the problem lies in the enforcement mechanism, which is inadequate and corrupt. Rather than making this mechanism more effective and accountable, our authorities are heading towards regularisation.
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