Sixty one bodies were extricated, at Moulivakkam in Kanchipuram district on the outskirts of Chennai, till the time search and rescue operations were suspended Friday. Thirty one victims had perished in the Canacona tragedy.
Nearly 100 labourers who had escaped the drought and hardships of meager wages and poor agriculture from surrounding districts, states and from Orissa had gathered for their weekly pay day when the building collapsed on them. Some managed to escape by the skin of their teeth while other were rescued.
The Mangadu police arrested and charged the promoters and some employees of Sristi Housing under various IPC sections, including Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), against the managing director Manoharan, architect, etc.
As the tragic event will recede into the dust of time, the magnitude of the devastation will be forgotten with the payment of compensation by politicians. But the lives of the families of the men and young mothers who were working there to send their children to school and eke out a living, will never be the same again.
In the Canacona tragedy too, the tragic event had devastated poor labourers and forever left their families bruised. After payment of compensation, the files seem to be collecting dust, with no visible progress to arrest the main culprits. The builders and contractors and architect have simply disappeared into thin air, without leaving a trace, by police claims.
It defies all logic that the Goa Police who are able to suo moto rush to Delhi and arrest a high profile journalist Tarun Tejpal, do not have the will to arrest the builders of Ruby Residency in a total display of duplicity. The virtual ‘go slow’ on the case has no other palpable reason other than vested interests and political connections and considerations.
The Chennai towers –Faith, the one that collapsed and Trust, the one that is to be demolished, were built on marshy land like Ruby Residency. Chief Minister J Jayalalitha on her preliminary evaluation has ruled that the structures were unstable and the developer had violated various norms. The officials are now looking for soil tests and other checks to determine the stability of the building, after the tragedy occurred. If this had to be done prior to giving permissions, which is the bounden duty, a number of lives could have been saved.
In the Goa case too, the town and country planning and civic engineers and officials, some of whom have been arrested, had been lax, possibly in exchange for considerations. In both the Chennai and the Canacona cases, it can be seen how public officials, openly flout professional norms, are not there to serve the public but to abuse their positions for personal gain with scant respect for the lives of the poor workers and or residents who would inhabit the apartments.
It also goes to show in these cases that in their maniacal pursuit of huge profits, builders and developers see the lives of poor labourers as dispensable and their greed as indispensable.
Despite the existence of a code for builders and elaborate rules and regulations to ascertain the quality of the work carried out by builders, public servants of the Town and Country Planning, Planning and Development Authorities, Municipal Authorities and or politicians can all individually and collectively connive to carry out gross violations that finally end up in major tragedies like these. In the end most culprits are able to absolve themselves, pay compensation which adds up to a pittance, without any culpability or accountability and no stiff punishment under the law, to deter similar criminality in future.
The perpetrators of these tragedies should be given the harshest of punishment and be prosecuted for murder, since they willfully indulge in maximising profits at great risk to the workers, apartment purchasers and to society.
