Building collapses: dangers of illegal construction
The Hindu
Today, countless urban Indians live in unsafe, legally and structurally doomed buildings. Though RERA has addressed the problem, it does not apply to older buildings where most live
Illegal construction pertains to any building or addition to an existing building which does not comply with the existing municipal or civil laws and has been built without proper permissions. It might be built on encroached or an illegally appropriated land. In India, both are usually true and instances of such building collapses garner negative press globally each year.
It may seem typically like an Indian problem, created by a combination of an acute housing shortage and collusion of politicians with unscrupulous fly-by-night builders in the past. However, illegally constructed buildings do not necessarily cater to only the lower rungs of the social pyramid. Here there have also been well-documented instances of luxury towers being erected either on encroached land or without building clearances.
Also, India is not the only country waging a war against the scourge of illegal construction. This continues to be a problem across the globe. There is no shortage of examples of how illegal construction has hijacked cities’ real estate markets and indeed their overall potential.
Italy: Italy’s once scenic Palermo, which caught the spillover housing demand from nearby Sicily, saw a tremendous amount of what was referred to as ‘private construction’ for almost three decades between the 1950s and 1980s and between 1951 and 1961. This illegal construction boom happened under the active patronage of the organised crime syndicate known as the mafia.
Malta: In a more recent instance in the European island country of Malta, a luxury project consisting of 75 high-end units was illegally constructed in collusion between the developer and the local environmental protection agency. The case is still in court.
Brazil: In Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, the infamous ‘favelas’ or illegally developed slums have existed since the 19th century and continue to confound the city’s development authorities to the present day. Created and protected by local crime organisations, Rio’s favela slums are notorious for being densely packed, extraordinarily unsanitary and polluted, and breeding grounds for disease.
Turkey: Turkey has its own problems with what they call Gecekondus — homes constructed almost overnight without any clearances or permissions. The people who build these low-cost housing projects are usually migrants from Turkey’s rural areas seeking to settle down on the larger cities’ outskirts. Gecekondus, literally meaning ‘constructed overnight’, exploit an interesting legal loophole in Turkish law. This law prevents the authorities from tearing down or taking any action against people who manage to construct homes between late evening and early morning of the next day without being noticed by the law enforcement authorities. Instead, the authorities can only begin legal proceedings against such squatters, which usually drag on endlessly.