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Mumbai, September 14: IN THE eleventh such incident in Mumbai this year, two balconies of a Dadar building that housed civic employees from the Solid Waste Management Department and their families collapsed on Wednesday afternoon. There were no casualties.
The four-storey building in Gautam Nagar, Dadar (East), a predominantly Gujarati locality, was built in 1980 by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Though the top floors of the dilapidated building had been evacuated, the structure was not on the BMC’s list of 108 endangered buildings.
Two years ago, 60 residents who stayed in the top floors were shifted into a transit camp close to the building. Since then, the building has been occupied by 15 ground-floor residents.
Shaken by the collapse, on Wednesday, angry residents questioned why they weren’t moved to a safer place. ‘‘If the top floors collapse, it will obviously affect the ground-floor residents,’’ said Jayaram Govind Rathore (55), a civic employee.
Last year, the BMC alloted rooms at the Dongri Jail Road transit camp and asked the ground-floor residents to move. ‘‘But when we went there, they pelted stones on us. So we came back,’’ said Jagdish Waghela (45), a ground-floor resident.
‘‘We are BMC employees, yet we get no attention from the authorities. There is so much space in the area, yet the BMC is not constructing a building here,’’ complained Deepak Waghela (40).
Assistant Municipal Commissioner of the F-South ward, V G Bole, promised to evict the residents to a ‘‘safe place’’ after Ganeshotsav. |