THE UNDOING OF THE CODE-THE NORM AND NOT THE EXCEPTION

The builder-politician-town planner nexus skirted this code to build the twin towers but someone caught on and dragged them to court. The courts ruled that the violation of NBC was unacceptable and took the extreme step of ordering the demolition. But is this the only instance?

I will digress here a little bit and relate an incident that happened on a construction site of another ‘super-tech’ type company based on an eyewitness account. At a huge construction site of a high-rise in suburban Mumbai labors were working at a great height when a worker fell off and got impaled in rods and died a slow and painful death. The news never saw the light of day and the construction goes on even as I write. Obviously proper safety precautions, safety gear and set guidelines were flouted leading to the loss of a poor life in pain but NBC - Nobody Cared.

The spirit behind construction and town planning cannot be a penny-wise pound-foolish exercise. In the short term, there is a need to strictly supervise and ensure use of quality material, strong and compulsive rationale in terms of strength and durability of the construction, and safety of on-site and off-site workforce at all times by providing proper safety gear and related risk protection paraphernalia. In the longer-term environmental concerns, farsighted approach to ensure that the construction does not become a liability or obstruction in the future and similar concerns need to be taken care of.

At the outset itself, the construction must have NBC compliant fire and disaster safety installations that are to be maintained for easy use 24x7. All this requires money, money that the deeply corrupt nexus which is unfortunately omnipresent in the system will do anything to save for selfish reasons. They have no compunctions about palming off unsafe death traps in the name of housing to unsuspecting people who pay them fat money to buy the sword that will hang all their lives over their heads ever since they move in. They have no care for the fact that as such constructions mushroom, the city and by extension the country will become a concrete jungle with fires, house collapses and accidents becoming a regular feature, and this indeed is already happening around us.

Logically, if the reasons why twin towers were brought down were applied uniformly across the country, we probably would go back to the dinosaur era addressing the one in the room.

My advice would be – book your cave now.