Kolkata: In the wake of the recent collapse of a portion of a dilapidated building in Beniapukur, which has further mounted worries for the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), the civic body is mulling a rehabilitation plan where government schools can be used as a temporary shelter to shift residents in the event of a sudden collapse.
With the arrival of monsoons every year, the civic body gears up for immediate response in cases of building collapse.
Being an old city, the central and northern parts of Kolkata face the highest risk with the most number of old and dilapidated buildings located there.
At Beniapukur recently a portion inside the four-storied dilapidated building at Gorachand Lane collapsed. The police disaster management team had to extricate some of the residents who were trapped inside.
The building is said to be 30 years old. But after the incident, more than 50 families who were residing there became homeless overnight. Many of whom have nowhere else to go. This has paved the way for a new crisis which is to rehabilitate people of such dilapidated buildings in the event of a collapse.
KMC sources said that although the civic body has started an awareness campaign where residents of such structures are being asked to vacate the premises for their safety, the civic body is also making an alternate plan pertaining to where the occupants can be shifted in the event of a collapse.
It is learnt that the primary schools of the civic body are where these occupants may be shifted for emergency purposes.
According to the civic body’s record there are about 2500 dangerous buildings in the city out of which the condition of more than 250 buildings are worrisome. The KMC building department is most concerned with these sets of buildings that are in a critical condition. Some of these are in Lenin Sarani, SN Banerjee Road, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Burrabazar, Chitpore, Bhowanipore etc.
To assure the occupants that they will have the right to move back once the building is razed down and reconstructed, the state government introduced the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022 that now allows the civic body to issue a ‘certificate of occupancy’ to inhabitants of dilapidated properties in the city who may now either shift elsewhere temporarily during the reconstruction work of the building, or can erect a temporary structure within the premises for rehabilitation purposes before development work begins. If the occupiers of the dilapidated building shift somewhere else to facilitate the development work process, they will be provided the certificate of occupancy under supervision of the KMC.