A five-storeyed illegal building in Garden Reach’s Azhar Molla Bagan was being built over the past year but the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) came to know about it only after it collapsed on Sunday night and killed at least nine people.
The structure had come up in an area where the MLA is Firhad Hakim, Calcutta’s mayor. Hakim has been vociferous in public against the mushrooming of illegal buildings in the city but he could not prevent one from coming up in his backyard.
The Trinamul Congress councillor of Ward 134, which includes Azhar Molla Bagan, is Shams Iqbal, son of Munna Iqbal, a former councillor and the alleged mastermind in the murder of a police officer outside Harimohan Ghose College in Garden Reach in 2013.
Calls to Shams Iqbal on Monday from this newspaper went unanswered.
Assistant engineers and sub-assistant engineers of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) in the wards are responsible for identifying illegal constructions in their respective areas. That did not happen in the case of the building next to J 509/1 Azhar Molla Bagan.
On Tuesday, the CMC issued show-cause notices to the two engineers of the ward. “They have been showcaused for dereliction of duty,” said an official.
Hakim sprang to the defence of the councillors in the wake of a swirl of allegations across the city that illegal buildings cannot come up without the support of the local civic councillor.
“Councillors are people’s representatives. It is not possible for them to identify an illegal construction. It is the job of the administration, the engineers of the CMC, to spot any illegal structure,” he said.
“This building did not have any permit from the CMC.”
Two women who live close to the crash site said the building was being built over the past 12 to 14 months.
Sheikh Raja, who lives nearby, said casting for all the floors had been completed. Only half of the walls had been built till the third floor.
“Most buildings here are built illegally, without any permit from the CMC. No one dares to complain. If someone complains, the promoter’s men will thrash the complainant. Why would someone raise their voice?” he said.
“You will find buildings coming up within six months in the same area.”
According to local sources, the promoter of the building that collapsed, Mohammad Wasim, aka Wasi, had constructed over 10 other buildings in the area. “He has been in the business for eight to 10 years,” a resident of the locality said.
CMC officials said one of the reasons for the collapse might be the use of sub-standard construction materials. An official who had been to the collapse site said he found the rods used in the columns thinner than what they should be. “It made the structure weak,” he said.
“The building was being constructed with poor quality materials. It might be that the foundation was not proportionate to that of a five-storeyed structure. Otherwise, it would not have collapsed,” he said.
The collapse of the building in Garden Reach is the first such incident in the CMC area since the collapse of the Shivalik apartment block in 1995, in which 16 residents died in their sleep.
“There have been incidents of dilapidated buildings collapsing, but we did not come across an incident where an under-construction building had crashed,” said the official.
Hakim said that in the past year the CMC had issued notices to over 2,800 illegal buildings asking them to stop construction because they were found to have been built without permission.
A CMC official said they had demolished over 700 illegal buildings in the past year.
Calcuttans would want more.