Delhi Buildings Collapsing: Yours is Next

The state of infrastructure in Delhi (NCT), the capital of our beloved India, is dire; the problem is not merely about old buildings—the issue runs much deeper.

This article attempts to highlight the root cause of the problem and some practical solutions that the government could adopt.

Okay, Start!

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Delhi’s Building Collapses and Coaching Fires Aren’t Accidents — They’re a Paper Trail of Warnings No One Acted On

This report is not written to make you sad. It’s written to make you angry enough to demand something changes before the next building fills up with students — not after.

This Is Not a List of Accidents

It’s a Pattern With a Paper Trail.

Every time a PG collapses or a coaching centre burns in Delhi-NCR, the same sentence gets used: “a tragic accident.” Read the actual record — court filings, police statements, fire department reports — and that word stops holding up.

This has happened too many times, in too many of the same ways, with too many of the same warnings ignored beforehand, for “accident” to still be accurate. It is a known failure mode the system keeps allowing to repeat.

Here is the verified timeline. No estimated death tolls, no invented averages — only what’s actually on record:

…………. ……. ….. … .. .

• 2019, Surat — a fire in a four-storey building housing a coaching centre killed 19 to 22 students, several falling from windows trying to escape a building with no working fire exit.
• 2023, Mukherjee Nagar, Delhi — a fire at Bhandari House, packed with coaching institutes, forced students to break windows and climb down ropes. The post-fire inspection found the building had no firefighting equipment at all.
• 2023, Delhi High Court — acting on that fire, the court ordered every coaching centre without a fire NOC shut down. Delhi Police’s own status report to the court gave the real number: of 583 coaching institutes running in the capital, only 67 had a fire NOC. Roughly 88% were operating illegally, in plain sight, for years.
• 2024, Old Rajinder Nagar, Delhi — three UPSC aspirants drowned in the flooded basement of a coaching institute’s study circle. That basement was being used as a library and reading room — a use it was never approved for.
• 2025, Bhajanpura, Delhi — an under-construction building housing a coaching centre collapsed. Five dead, four of them students.
• 2025, Welcome, Delhi — a residential building collapsed, killing six members of one family. Police registered a negligence case.
• 2026, Aliganj, Lucknow — a fire in a commercial building housing a coaching centre killed 14 to 18 people. Within 48 hours, Noida and Ghaziabad authorities scrambled to inspect and seal roughly 60 other establishments running without fire clearance — proof the buildings were already known to exist. Nobody acted until the deaths forced it.

Seven incidents. Three states. Seven years.

The same three failures, every time: no fire NOC, an illegally repurposed floor or basement, and a building never designed to hold the number of people actually packed inside it.

The Loophole That Makes This Legal on Paper

Here’s the detail that should make you angriest, because it isn’t negligence in the ordinary sense — it’s negligence written into the law itself.

The Delhi Fire Service Act of 2007 only applies to buildings taller than 15 metres. Most coaching centres and PGs in Delhi operate out of three- and four-storey buildings that sit just under that line.

A large share of the buildings packing hundreds of students onto a single floor are, by the letter of the law, not required to meet the fire safety standard that might have saved lives in Mukherjee Nagar, in Bhajanpura, in Lucknow. This gap isn’t hidden. It has been sitting in the statute for nineteen years.

The Trade-Off Nobody’s Naming

A compliant PG or hostel in Delhi-NCR typically runs ₹15,000-20,000 a month. The buildings in this timeline — the ones without a fire NOC, the ones with a single staircase, the ones with an illegally converted basement — often go for a fraction of that.

For a student or a migrant worker on a tight budget from home, choosing the cheaper room isn’t ignorance of the risk.

It’s the only option the market has actually left them, because nobody has built affordable housing that is also compliant. Cheap and unsafe keep being the same building, over and over, because cheap and safe has never been made possible at scale.

The Accountability Chain Stops One Rung Too Low

Look at who gets arrested after each of these incidents: the coaching institute operator, the PG owner, the building’s registered owner.

Now look at who never appears in a single one of these cases — the engineer who approved the original building plan, the municipal inspector who either never visited or visited and did nothing, and whoever made sure a pending notice sat unenforced for years.

The investigation ends exactly one level above the victims and one level below the people who actually had the power to stop it before it happened.

What Actually Needs to Change, on a Timeline

0-6 months: Close the 15-metre loophole — no building housing a coaching centre or PG, regardless of height, should be exempt from mandatory fire NOC requirements.

Run ward-wise audits of every PG, hostel, and coaching centre in Delhi-NCR, sealing failures immediately, not noticing and revisiting them. Launch a public, anonymous safety-complaint helpline with a mandatory 48-hour inspection response.

6 months-2 years: Make fire NOC status a public, searchable registry — not a certificate produced once and forgotten, but a status any parent or student can check before enrolling or signing a lease, the way you’d check a restaurant’s food safety rating before eating there.

Criminal liability, not suspension, for the officials who approved or ignored unsafe structures. Fast-track courts for building-safety cases, resolved in 12 months, not a decade.

2-5 years: Insurance premiums tied to verified safety compliance, so an unsafe building costs its owner more to insure, not just more to bribe past.

Real investment in regulated, affordable student and worker housing — because until the cheap option is also the safe option, this keeps happening by design, not by accident.

This Is the Line RT Won’t Soften

Delhi is the capital of the country. When 88% of its coaching centres are found, in the government’s own court filing, to be operating without the one certificate meant to prevent exactly this kind of death — that is not an oversight statistic.

That is a capital city that has known the scale of the risk, in writing, since at least 2023, and watched the same risk keep killing people in 2024, 2025, and 2026.

A relief cheque to a grieving family is not justice. It is the minimum a government can do to be seen doing something. Justice looks like the loophole closed before the next building fills up with students, not after.

Agar yeh baar baar wahi kahani hai, toh iska matlab yeh koi hadsa nahi — yeh ek chuna hua risk hai jise kisi ne band karne se pehle kabhi zaroori nahi samjha.

(If this is the same story happening again and again, then it was never really an accident — it’s a chosen risk nobody found urgent enough to close, until now.) Delhi doesn’t need more condolences.

It needs the fire NOC on every coaching building and PG in this city checked before the next admission season starts — not after the next fire.

Actions by NCT of Delhi, Till date

1. Delhi High Court’s suo motu shutdown order (June 2023, reaffirmed May 10, 2024) — After the Mukherjee Nagar coaching fire, the High Court took suo motu cognizance and directed MCD and DDA to immediately shut down all coaching centres violating fire safety norms. When it found in April 2024 that some “closed” centres had reopened under new names, the court pulled up MCD directly and ordered those specific properties shut again.

2. Directorate of Education safety guidelines (July 31, 2024) — After the Old Rajinder Nagar basement drowning that killed three UPSC aspirants, Delhi’s DoE issued guidelines requiring schools and institutions to follow the Master Plan for Delhi 2021 rules on basement use, and to take steps preventing waterlogging on their premises.

3. MCD coaching centre survey (completed by June 2026) — MCD compiled a survey identifying 923 coaching centres operating across Delhi. Separately, MCD officials stated only about 950 coaching centres citywide are officially registered with valid fire safety clearances — a number that still leaves an unknown but acknowledged share operating unregistered.

4. Post-Lucknow emergency inspection drive (June 24-25, 2026) — Two days after the Lucknow Aliganj fire killed 15, Delhi Education Minister Ashish Sood ordered DDA, MCD, Delhi Fire Service, and DDMA to run special inspection drives across the three major coaching hubs — Mukherjee Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Katwaria Sarai — checking fire safety and building-bylaw compliance, with MCD directed to file a daily Action Taken Report to the minister’s office.

5. CM’s one-month compliance deadline (June 27, 2026) — Chief Minister Rekha Gupta gave coaching institutes without a fire audit or mandatory safety equipment one month to comply or face sealing, opened a public complaint channel (SMS/email/phone) for students to report unsafe institutes, and had a nodal officer appointed to begin drafting a new, comprehensive regulatory policy for coaching centres.

over 2000 buildings flagged with serious repair requirement and 7 sealed.

RT Verdict

Delhi govt. must inspect all buildings at rapid rate, citizens should also help via tagging online, bribery on building many floor should stop with serious punishments.

Situation now is reactive, tragedy-triggered, and slow — has failed on its own record, seven times over.

The only response worth taking seriously now is one that makes an unsafe building impossible to operate, not merely illegal on paper.

Research Sources:

• The Tribune — Delhi Police’s 583-institute, 67-NOC status report to Delhi High Court
• OneIndia News — Lucknow fire sealing of ~60 Noida/Ghaziabad establishment
• Deccan Herald — Bhajanpura building collapse and Welcome area negligence FIR

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