Hunt for survivors as illegally-built Mumbai block collapses

A building being built illegally in a suburb of India’s financial capital Mumbai has collapsed into a mound of steel and concrete, killing at least 41 people and injuring more than 50 others, authorities say.

Rescue workers with sledgehammers, petrol-powered saws and hydraulic jacks were struggling to break through the rubble in their search for survivors.

The dead included at least 11 children, police said.

At least four floors of the planned eight-storey building had been completed and were occupied. Workers were adding the eighth floor when it collapsed, police Inspector Digamber Jangale said. Some of the dead were construction workers. The building did not have the necessary clearances from local authorities, he said.

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It was not immediately clear what caused the collapse, but local police commissioner K.P. Raghuvanshi said the structure was weak. Police were searching for the builders to arrest them.

“The inquiry is ongoing. We are all busy with the rescue operation; our priority now is to rescue as many as possible,” he said.

Police with rescue dogs were searching the building, which appeared to have buckled and collapsed upon itself. Rescuers and nearby residents stood on the remains of the roof trying to get to people trapped inside. Residents carried the injured to ambulances and one man carried a small child caked white with dust from the wreckage. Mr Raghuvanshi said rescue workers had saved 15 people from the wreckage.

Building collapses are common in India as builders try to cut corners by using poor quality materials. Multi-storey structures are built with inadequate supervision. The massive demand for housing around India’s cities and pervasive corruption allow builders to add unauthorised floors or build entirely illegal buildings.

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Officials said the neighbourhood where the building collapsed was part of a belt of illegal structures that had sprung up. “There are lot of people involved [in illegal construction] – builders, government machinery, police, municipal corporation – everybody is involved in this process,” G.S. Khairnar, a former top Mumbai official, told CNN-IBN television.

A local resident, who did not give his name, said the site was meant to hold a smaller structure and accused officials of turning a blind eye to the problem. “They made an eight-storey building of what was supposed to be a four-storey building. People from the municipality used to visit but the builder still continued to add floors,” he said.

Nearly 70 people were killed in November 2010 when an apartment building in New Delhi crumpled. It was two floors higher than legally allowed.