BUILT-IN DANGER

While bringing down scores of high-rise buildings and killing hundreds of their residents, the January 26 earthquake exposed the weak foundations of Ahmedabad's building boom.

BY late evening, the skyline of Vastrapur, the cosmopolitan township to the west of Ahmedabad that absorbed much of the urban explosion that the city saw in the last 15 years, turns dark and quiet. The clusters of towering multi-storey structures that ar e normally aglow with light at this hour, are for the most part in darkness. There is the odd window here or door there that has light, the rare home which a family has not fled.

The majority of those who live in the high-rise apartments of Vastrapur, however, have deserted their homes. They have not returned even a month after the earthquake of January 26, either because the damage suffered by their apartment blocks has made the m unsafe or simply because they feared another earthquake.

It is a fear that refuses to go away. Each aftershock or tremor - and there have been several since the January 26 event - heightens these fears. People rush out of their apartments with every tremor, real or imagined. Each time, they re-live the calami tous morning when they ran down eight or ten flights of stairs not knowing if they would make it to the ground before the roof caved in on them.

By bringing down scores of high-rise buildings, killing 745 persons and maiming hundreds, the earthquake exposed the rickety foundations of Ahmedabad's building boom. While the relentless pursuit of profits by private builders drove this boom, their path s and strategies remained unfettered by any meaningful government regulation. Independent media investigations, judicial interventions, and general public pressure on the State government to get to the bottom of the mess have resulted in the contours of a full-fledged scandal becoming exposed. Police investigations and media reports have brought to light wholesale violations of construction standards and building bylaws by influential builders, the negligence of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and t he Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA), and a nexus involving builders, politicians and the administration.

"The main cause for all this was that nobody told us that Ahmedabad is in seismic zone three and that therefore buildings had to be specially designed," Surendra Patel, AUDA Chairman, told Frontline. Patel, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party function ary who is also one of the party's fund collectors, has been criticised for his stewardship of a regulatory body that did little to stop unregulated and illegal construction activity in new Ahmedabad. Patel is an engineer by training, and his disarming i nnocence of Ahmedabad's seismic status further shakes public confidence in public servants and the institutions they head. "Buildings are normally designed to take vertical loads and an additional wind load if they are more than five storeys high," Patel explained. Earthquake-proof high-rise buildings must take vibrating horizontal loads. Most of Ahmedabad's low-rise buildings (those of five storeys and less), he said, are built on hollow plinths supported only by columns, which also cannot take horizon tal loads. Many of these structures had heavy water tanks on them which added to the instability of the building, Patel said.

The rule that architectural and structural drawing plans should be submitted either to the municipal corporation or the AUDA was waived a few years ago. Builders were asked to submit only the basic building plans for approval before they started construc tion. At one level, the decision made sense as it would have been an immense task to check each drawing for structural completeness. "It is like asking the Medical Council of a State to check the prescriptions each doctor gives," said a leading architect of Ahmedabad, who did not wish to be named. However, the authorities should have insisted that the structural plans should be submitted, at least for the record.

The builders usually violated the sanctioned plans in a number of ways. First, buildings built on land earmarked for residential purposes would in actual practice have a dual purpose. Most builders of high-rise apartments sold the ground storey to shops and commercial establishments. Secondly, the area shown as balcony space in the original plan would be covered either fully or partially to make for greater room space. Third, penthouses which were not part of the original plan, would be constructed. In the case of some of the apartments that collapsed, such as Mansi, in which 33 persons died and Shikhar, in which 88 died, there were illegal terrace gardens and swimming pools that added enormous weight to the structure.

Apart from these standard violations, builders also compromised on the quantity and use of steel and concrete. They got away with these violations as the municipal corporation and the AUDA rarely conducted inspections. Finally, most builders did not both er to obtain the completion certificate from either the municipal corporation or the AUDA. "Eighty to 90 per cent of buildings constructed in the last 20 years in Ahmedabad do not have a building use certificate," a prominent architect in the city told < I>Frontline.

In the area falling under the jurisdiction of the AUDA, 12 buildings collapsed. Of these, two were high-rise buildings and the rest low-rise ones. Surendra Patel said that the AUDA was not solely responsible for the collapse of these buildings. There was another main reason, he said - the lack of awareness among the people. Other factors that led to the problem, according to him, were the restrictive provisions of the Land Ceiling Act (repealed by the Bharatiya Janata Party government two years ago), wh ich created a shortage of land and thus pushed up urban land prices. Builders took advantage of this shortage by building vertically. Patel said that factors such as complicated bylaws, a tortuous procedure to get plans sanctioned and the lack of proper monitoring during construction were contributory factors.

Neither the municipal corporation nor the AUDA has gone public with the list of erring builders. News reports in the Gujarat press spoke of how the files that contained building plans had mysteriously disappeared. One report said that they were burnt dur ing the riots in 1991 and another that they were reportedly destroyed in last years floods.

The task of retributive justice has been left to the police. "Around 57 first information reports (FIR) have been filed by the residents of buildings that have collapsed," Ahmedabad Police Commissioner P.C. Pandey told Frontline. "We are increasin g the scope of the FIRs to include builders, architects and competent authorities where negligence can be proved. Cases have been filed under Sections 304 and 120B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), apart from the provisions of the Gujarat Flat Ownership Ac t. To strengthen the cases, each of the sites were being inspected by experts from the forensic science laboratories, engineers of the quality control cell of the government's Roads and Buildings Division, and officials from the National Council for Ceme nt and Building Materials under the Ministry of Industries of the Government of India. Material from the sites is being tested against the Bureau of Indian Standards specifications," Pandey said.

The violations are shocking according to Pandey. For example, a four-storey building might have a one-metre foundation. A water tank which on paper has a sanctioned capacity of 500 to 600 litres would actually have a capacity of 50,000 or 60,000 litres. The police have issued arrest warrants against 14 persons and already arrested eight. These include Raju Vyas and Satish Shah, the builders of Mansi and Shikar apartments. Rambhai Pathre, the builder-cum-director of the Swaminarayan School in which 32 ch ildren died, and Bakulesh Oza, the builder of Sundarvan apartments in which 24 persons died, are also under arrest. The police have asked for the establishment of a special court to try builders. There are limitations to how far this investigative track can be taken. Although the arrested builders are still in custody, they have already moved the courts for bail. The criminal proceedings are likely to become a long-drawn process.

WHAT is being done about the safety of the standing structures? How can public confidence in them be restored? What is being done to make the existing structures earthquake-resistant? The municipal corporation and the AUDA could not have led a public con fidence-building campaign given their own culpability. In the circumstances, they have done the next best thing: the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad, has been made the nodal agency to assess and classify the extent of d amage to buildings. "We asked A.S. Arya, Chairman, Bureau of Indian Standards, to update the format used internationally to assess earthquake damage, taking into account the standard building practices here," P.U. Asnani, former Deputy Chairman of the mu nicipal corporation and currently Adviser to the Municipal Commissioner, told Frontline. "Damage is assessed on a scale from G to G5, that is, from no structural damage to building collapse. The joint team of the municipal corporation and the CEPT invited applications from flat and house owners who wanted assessment done of the damage to their buildings. We received about 5,000 applications from people who live in RCC (re-inforced cement concrete) structures," Vasnani said.

Structural engineers from all over the country were invited for a week and sent to sites in the city to assess the damage. The assessment work was completed in record time. Within a few weeks, most flat owners who had made applications in response to the initial advertisement had received a certification from the CEPT team. Each certificate states the level of damage (G-G5), describes the damage, and suggests the kind of retrofitting that is required to be done to make the building earthquake-resistant. In the case of those buildings that fall under categories G3 and G4, the CEPT team recommended vacation of the premises until repairs were carried out, Vasnani said.

"The CEPT initiative has created enormous confidence among flat owners, as they now have a scientific assessment of their buildings' structural strength. More important, they know what must be done to retrofit the building. Our next plan is to empanel a group of structural engineers with a proven track record. They can be approached by house owners who need to make structural changes to their buildings," said Vasnani.

The announcement of a relief package by the Gujarat government for home owners whose properties were damaged or destroyed resulted in a flood of another 60,000 applications from around the city. The government relief package offers compensation based upo n the extent of damage. The maximum it offers is Rs.1.75 lakhs for a family whose house has been destroyed in a building using RCC, and Rs.1.4 lakhs for a house destroyed in a load-bearing (non-RCC) building.

The residents of Ahmedabad, however, see these initiatives as offering too little, too late. The compensation they may finally extract from the government may cover only a small part of the repair and reconstruction costs. Yet it may be to the hated buil der that house owners may finally have to turn for help.