Looking for the rot in Chennai debris

The Chennai building collapse, which has taken a huge toll, is a wake-up call for our lawmakers and municipal and planning administrators. This was not an illegal building being constructed clandestinely in a congested part of an old city - this was a completely new construction in an area planned by Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority. That's why it's even more disturbing and highlights the loopholes in law.

We don't have a law that regulates civil and structural engineers. This allows anyone who possesses a diploma or a degree in civil engineering to design the structure of a building. The distinction between those who are trained to design and those who should be only supervising construction gets blurred. You need to know how to evaluate soil structure, seismic conditions and a lot more. Only a post-graduate education can make a difference. Most municipal bodies, however, allow unqualified persons to do the job.

The job of a construction supervisor is also unregulated - not even a municipal licence is required. So, what you get are glorified masons, without any formal skills) or diploma holders who have no working skills.

Our municipal laws do not fix any professional responsibility for the various skills required for such a complex building activity. So, while unregulated persons are allowed to design structures and even electrical and other building components, they cannot be held to account. The municipal bodies simply wink at this because municipal governance in the country is founded on corruption.

What compounds the problem is that neither records of the design processes, nor drawings are stored anywhere.

Neither designers nor municipalities have any system of recording simple data like what load a building has been designed for or how much water or power it will consume.

And at the bottom of this huge mess is the moribund state of our architectural and engineering education. Colleges have mushroomed in every district without adequately trained teachers. These degree shops turn out graduates who have no knowledge of their subjects, just a piece of paper to show at the end of four to five years in the classroom. It's no wonder then that the responsibility which comes with such a professional degree escapes them.

The lack of a real estate regulator, of course, is the last nail in the coffin. There is no one to protect the consumer against unscrupulous builders and ensure that all laws related to construction of buildings are followed. In this particular case, the person who had projected himself as the building's architect was not one. The architect who signed the drawings probably did not perform the statutory professional duties with any diligence. And nothing is known about the design or construction engineers.

So, the result is an unavoidable tragedy of grave proportions. How many times will we allow this to happen?

(Sudhir Vohra is an architect and urban planner)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority,Chennai building collapse

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