The death toll in the building collapse in Old Delhi's Hauz Qazi area rose to three on Saturday after rescuers recovered another body from the debris, even as the search and rescue operation at the site entered its third day.
Officials said the body of Pankaj Sharma, aged 40, was recovered during the ongoing operation at the collapse site in Gali Sitara, near the Chawri Bazar Metro station. Sharma, the son of Hazari Sharma, was a resident of Hanuman Nagar village in Bihar's Khagaria district and was working as a labourer at the construction site when the structure came down.
With the latest recovery, five people have now been pulled out of the debris. Three of them have died, while two others were rescued alive with injuries and are receiving treatment. The injured men have been identified as Sahdev Chaudhary, aged 25, and Firoz, aged 37. Both are reported to be stable.
The three-storey building, which was under construction, collapsed at around 9.45 am on Thursday, triggering a massive rescue operation involving the Delhi Police, the National Disaster Response Force, the Delhi Fire Services and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Rescue teams have remained stationed at the site since the incident, working through the debris to clear the rubble and to check whether anyone else remains trapped underneath.
Two labourers had died on the day of the collapse itself. They were identified as Kishori, aged 40, and Sanjeet, aged 45. Their bodies were recovered on Thursday, while one injured person was rescued and taken to hospital the same day.
The recovery of Pankaj Sharma's body on Saturday, nearly 48 hours after the collapse, underlined how painstaking the operation has been, with rescuers working slowly and carefully through unstable rubble to avoid endangering anyone who might still be alive beneath it.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central) Rohit Rajbir Singh had said soon after the incident that around 10 to 15 labourers were present at the construction site when the three-storey structure came crashing down. That estimate has shaped the rescue effort, with teams working on the assumption that more people could still be trapped.
Around 30 personnel from the National Disaster Response Force and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi have been engaged in the operation, according to officials, and the search continued on Saturday even after the third body was found.
Police have registered a case in connection with the collapse. An FIR has been lodged under Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which deals with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, against the building owners and the contractors involved in the construction. Three contractors have been arrested in connection with the incident. They have been identified as Siraj, Tajuddin and Furkan, all residents of Sirohi village in Tehsil Dauj in Haryana's Faridabad district.
According to the police, the construction work underway in the building that collapsed was illegal, and the structure itself was unsafe. That finding has raised serious questions about how construction on such a scale was allowed to proceed in one of the most congested parts of the capital, and about the monitoring of building activity by the civic authorities responsible for the area.
The collapse took place in a part of Old Delhi where narrow lanes, ageing buildings and dense construction are a familiar combination. Gali Sitara, where the building stood, is a crowded lane close to the Chawri Bazar Metro station, and the arrival of heavy rescue machinery and the presence of large numbers of rescue personnel have added to the difficulty of the operation.
Residents of the area watched through Thursday, Friday and Saturday as teams worked in shifts to remove debris piece by piece, a process that is necessarily slow when there is a possibility of survivors under the rubble.
Building collapses have recurred in Delhi's older quarters over the years, and each incident has been followed by promises of stricter enforcement against unauthorised construction and by drives to identify dangerous structures. The collapse in Chawri Bazar is likely to renew that debate, particularly because the police have described the construction as illegal.
The questions that will now be asked include who authorised the work, whether any official inspections were carried out while the building was being raised, and whether warnings, if any were issued, were acted upon.
For the families of the men who died, the immediate concern is far more personal. The three men who lost their lives were migrant labourers from Bihar, working far from home on a construction site in the capital. Their deaths have once again drawn attention to the conditions in which construction workers live and work, and to the risks they face when safety norms are ignored on building sites.
The injured men, meanwhile, remain under medical care, and officials said they were stable after treatment.
The investigation into the collapse is continuing alongside the rescue operation. Police are examining the role of the building owners and the contractors, and the circumstances in which the construction was undertaken. The arrests of the three contractors indicate that the police are treating the incident as a criminal matter rather than a mere accident, and further action may follow as the inquiry progresses and as the structural causes of the collapse become clearer.
As the operation moved into its third day, officials said the work of clearing the debris and searching for any remaining victims would continue until the site had been fully examined. The priority, they said, remained the possibility that someone could still be trapped, and the rescue teams would not be withdrawn until that possibility had been ruled out.
For the residents of the lane and for the families waiting for news, the long hours of the rescue have been a painful reminder of how quickly an ordinary working day can turn into a disaster, and of how much depends on the enforcement of rules that are meant to keep buildings, and the people who work in them, safe.
(Reporting based on NDTV and The Tribune.)