Data from Mumbai’s observatories suggests perilous wind speeds during the time of the billboard crash.
The Mumbai-based Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute is investigating the reasons behind this week’s hoarding crash in the city’s Ghatkopar suburb, which claimed 16 lives and injured at least 75 people. The results of the probe are expected next week. However, there is much in the public domain already that underlines that lives were lost because rules were not followed. The hoarding that was toppled by strong winds on Monday was three times the size sanctioned by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and had a weak foundation. The municipality claims it flagged the irregularities to the Government Railway Police (GRP), which owns the land where the hoarding stood. It also maintains that several notices were issued to Ego Media, the company which put the advertising panel, for defaulting on licence fees — Bhavesh Bhinde, Ego Media’s owner, was arrested on Thursday. However, the arrest should only be seen as the first step towards fixing accountability and putting remedial measures in place. The Ghatkopar tragedy is a grim reminder of the longstanding ills of urban governance in the country — flailing municipalities, agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, negligent officials, faulty street design and questionable space allocation processes.
The 74th constitutional amendment requires state governments to devolve 18 functions, including land use regulation, to municipalities. But several studies — including a 2021 Niti Aayog report — have revealed that no state government has delegated all 18 functions to civic bodies. Urban local bodies are often constricted because their remit clashes with other state agencies. In Delhi, for example, there is much confusion amongst the city’s municipality, DDA and PWD over road maintenance. Fire accidents in most cities are followed by government agencies passing the buck to each other – much like the BMC and GRP evading responsibility for the Ghatkopar tragedy. The apathetic attitude of officials compounds people’s problems — they have to knock on the doors of multiple authorities. One of the fundamental purposes of the 74th Amendment was that citizens would turn to corporators — the “first-mile” representatives — to cater to civic needs. But the term of the BMC’s elected members expired about two years ago. Bengaluru — currently facing a severe water crisis — does not have elected corporators. The failure of the state governments to hold civic body elections goes against the Supreme Court’s unequivocal directions in the Suresh Mahajan case (2022). “State government and State Election Commissions (SEC) are obliged to ensure that a newly elected body is installed in all municipalities before the expiry of the five-year term of the outgoing council,” the court said.
Data from Mumbai’s observatories suggests perilous wind speeds during the time of the billboard crash. But authorities in the city should have been alerted by a similar incident in neighbouring Pune in 2017 which claimed five lives — and one in nearby Pimpri-Chinchwad in April 2023, which also killed five people. The failures behind the Ghatkopar tragedy are multiple. But there is one dominant theme: Urban governance is not adequately empowered or accountable for people’s well being.
