Mayor seeks electricity and water disconnection for residents of dilapidated buildings

Seeks state policy on dilapidated buildings to avoid building collapse tragedies in future

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Mumbai: Mayor Kishori Pednekar asked the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to be more strict with residents who refuse to vacate the dangerously dilapidated buildings by using the existing provision to disconnect their water and electricity connections. Pednekar made this suggestion on August 31 at a special meeting of civic officials chaired by her to look into the issue of dilapidated buildings. 

Two buildings have collapsed in Mumbai city during this monsoon leading to casualties. While the collapse of the Bhanushali building on July 16 killed ten people, recently on August 27 partial collapse of Mishra building in Nagpada led to two deaths including that of a 12-year-old girl.  

Speaking to thenews21.com, Pednekar stated that each time a building collapses, the blame generally tends to fall on the civic authorities for their lack of pre-emptive action to save those lives. “While there are existing provisions to disconnect water and electricity connections to save lives of those staying in such buildings, generally it is avoided on humanitarian grounds and also due to fear of public criticism,” she said. Hence, she felt that the BMC needed to get more proactive in order to save the lives of the tenants.   

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Pednekar is now seeking to push for a new state policy on dilapidated buildings with the urban development ministry, to avoid such  regular tragedies. 

“Generally owners of dilapidated structures tend to deliberately delay redevelopment of such buildings to avoid paying for rents of their tenants during the redevelopment process. So, they wait either for the tenant to shift out voluntarily or wait for the building to collapse. This is because once a building collapses, the government authorities swing in to take care of the accommodation of the poor tenants,” explains Pednekar. 

She alleged: ”Most of the tenants are poor, who earn about Rs 8-10,000 per month and cannot afford to shift anywhere, while owners tend to stay safely outside. The owners deliberately block the redevelopment process by getting stay orders from the court. Once a court stay is obtained, then the authorities become helpless.”  

Pednekar asked the designated officials in each of  the 24 wards to list out all old buildings that were between 80- 100 years old and to work for their redevelopment. In case such old buildings continued to drag on redevelopment issues, the mayor suggested that they be penalised to get them to initiate the redevelopment process. She asked civic officials to serve at least two notices per month on such structures and to maintain proper records of such action initiated by them.

She also called in for better documentation on the part of civic authorities to avoid blame games and mud-slinging between different agencies functioning in the city on that issue. In the same breath, she asked officials to check proper documents of buildings in Gaothan areas in the city before initiating any action against them.