PUNE: The civic body has identified 274 buildings in the city as “highly dangerous” that can come crashing down anytime. Officials said most of the buildings identified are old and that they have now prepared a plan to evacuate residents from these buildings before the monsoon.

“Of the old properties identified, a majority are old wadas. There are 55 buildings that cannot be repaired and we have no option but to demolish them. There are 219 buildings that can be strengthened with major repairs,” said Sudhir Kadam, executive engineer of building department of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), while speaking to TOI.

Kadam said the PMC had served notices to residents of these buildings. Some of them have been shifted to transit camps. The civic body has already demolished 25 “extremely dangerous” buildings, while another 30 will be razed before the monsoon. The PMC is also helping out in the repair works of 219 high-risk buildings. The repair works will continue for nearly four months.

Among the buildings demolished so far is the Lakadi Ganpati building in Shukrawar Peth, which was razed last week. “Many old buildings in the area are risky. So its demolition was necessary. The Lakadi Ganpati building was more than 100-years-old and there was a short circuit here a couple of years ago that had made the building even more hazardous,” said Datta Pardeshi, a trustee of the Lakadi Ganpati temple. Pardeshi said the trustees and workers of the temple cooperated with the PMC and allowed the demolition, since the building was a threat to nearby residents.

The move to demolish dangerous buildings has come in a tad late. The municipal corporation had appointed a private agency to conduct a survey of dilapidated structures in the city in 2008. The survey report had said that over 1,186 old properties – majority of them in old wadas – were in a poor shape. Most of the identified buildings were located in Kasba Peth, Budhwar Peth, Shaniwar Peth, Nana Peth, Bhavani Peth and Narayan Peth. Once the report was ready, the civic body and the private agency had categorized the identified buildings in different categories, based on their structural stability. The civic body then prioritized work on the 274 buildings that were identified as highly dangerous.

Activists said the civic administration should have a long-term plan in place as against carrying out demolition drives before the monsoon. “There is no system in place in PMC to carry out structural stability checks of old buildings routinely. A mechanism for year-long structural audits should be developed,” said Maj Gen S C N Jatar (retd), founder of Nagari Chetana Manch, a citizen’s group. He added that not just old buildings but buildings built 30 or 40 years ago should also be checked on a regular basis. After all, degradation of the structure is a continuous process, he said.

Redevelopment of old properties in Pune has remained entangled in legal and policy matters for several decades. As per the PMC Development Plan (DP) of 1987, it was decided that wada-dwellers would be rehabilitated within the old city limits. But things never moved beyond the planning stage. In 2005-06, the civic standing committee made a budgetary provision of Rs 1 crore to repair dilapidated wadas, but these funds were hardly utilized. The PMC took an initiative in 2007, when the CIC drafted a policy which is still awaiting the government’s nod.

The PMC has come with an option of cluster development of the old wadas in the new draft development plan (2007 to 2027) for old city areas. More than two wadas can be considered as the cluster and redeveloped simultaneously.

The state legislature in 2011 had passed a bill to amend the Bombay Provincial Municipal Corporation (BPMC) Act, 1949, to make structural audits compulsory all over the state. It is now mandatory for occupants of 30-year-old buildings to submit a structural stability certificate.

Source: The Times of India