Illegal Building Collapse Kills 45, Injures 50 Near Mumbai

An illegally-constructed, half-completed building in the Mumbai suburb of Thane collapsed on Thursday evening, killing at least 45 people, including several children. Over 50 people were injured, and more than 20 are still missing; rescue workers, wielding construction equipment and driving bulldozers, are still at the scene, attempting to dig out possible survivors. Police, meanwhile, were trying to track down Jamil Qureshi and Salim Shaikh, the two builders who had illegally constructed the seven-story building and used substandard materials to do so. Of the dead, seven were construction workers from West Bengal, staying in the building as they added an eighth story—making it fully twice as high as zoning regulations are said to have allowed. "The entire incident reeks of corruption at many levels and in many departments," Anant Rangaswami writes at First Post. "From the local civil authorities who allowed the building to come up, to the electricity department which made connections available, to the water department which provided connections, to the local police station which failed to see something wrong, to the local politicians who seem not even to have noticed the illegal building coming up, to buyers of space in the building, which, if unauthorized, would not have registered the purchases." Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, visited the site of the accident on Friday. [NDTV | Guardian | First Post]