Police wrote to the MCD about the Chawri Bazar building in June. Six people are dead. Delhi needs to know what happened to that letter

A police officer put it in writing. On June 15, the station house officer at Hauz Qazi wrote to the MCD’s City-SP Zone that unauthorised construction was being carried out in a building in Gali Sitara. On November 5, at about 9:50 am, that building collapsed. Six people died, five of them from Bihar.

Four arrests and two suspensions followed, as they usually do. They do not answer the question the letter raises.

What the paper trail shows

According to the police letter, the property was a new build of about 70 square yards and the violation was marked “small”. The MCD says it received the letter on June 15 with photographs that suggested repair work, inspected, found the owner doing repairs, and received no later complaint. It says tax records listed the property as ground plus four floors, and that fresh construction on the second and third floors, done under the label of repair, was outside the terms of its advisory. It accuses the owner of a “mala fide intention to misguide the authority” and says it has asked the police to register a case.

Both accounts can be true at once. A warning arrived, an inspection took place, and the building was still there, unsafe, five months later. An MCD official has said the material used was “non-engineered and had not been set properly” and that work had slowed about 15 days before the collapse, when the roof slab was being cast. A worker rescued from the site said the wooden supports under a new slab had started creaking and that he warned others.

The fair defence of the MCD

The corporation has a large city and few inspectors. Repair work in crowded old neighbourhoods is routine, and an inspector who finds a man fixing a wall cannot demolish it on a police letter. Shahjahanabad is also a heritage area where, as Minister Ashish Sood has acknowledged, development norms have not yet been framed. Owners exploit that gap.

That is the reason to fix the process, because the inspector acted within it and the building still fell.

What Delhi should do

First, the inquiry that Mayor Pravesh Wahi said would report within three days should be published in full, including what the inspector saw on the visit following the June letter and why no stop order was issued.

Second, a police or citizen complaint about unauthorised construction should trigger a written order within a fixed number of days, either stopping work or recording in writing why it is lawful. A reply that says “repair” should come with a structural check when floors are being added.

Third, the MCD should publish a ward-wise list of buildings under unauthorised construction, updated each month, with the action taken against each. The adjoining building at Chawri Bazar, which authorities have flagged as possibly unstable, shows how many such neighbours exist.

Fourth, engineers should face the same standard as owners. If an inspection is shown to have missed obvious violations, the suspension should become a disciplinary case with a conclusion, not a pause until attention moves on.

Fifth, the heritage-area rules the government says it is working on through the Shahjahanabad Development Board should be notified with a date, not promised.

Delhi has seen this before. The people who died on Thursday were under a roof that was still being built. Delhi owed them a city that read its own letters.

The reporting behind this view

• June 15date of the Hauz Qazi police letter to the MCD on unauthorised construction at the property
• 6people dead in the November 5, 2026, collapse in Gali Sitara
• 4arrested, including the owner, under BNS sections 105 and 290; two MCD engineers suspended