In less than a week, Delhi witnessed a series of incidents that together raise troubling questions about the state of building safety governance in India’s cities. A building collapse near Saket Metro Station claimed six lives. Another multi-storey structure collapsed in Karawal Nagar. A devastating hotel fire in Malviya Nagar killed 21 people and injured dozens more. While the immediate causes of these incidents may differ, they reveal a common underlying problem: weak enforcement of building regulations, inadequate safety oversight, and the absence of a robust accountability framework.Only a few days later, on June 3, another four-storey building collapsed in Karawal Nagar, northeast Delhi. Fortunately, no casualties were reported as the structure had been abandoned. However, the incident underscored a larger concern, the widespread presence of unauthorised and poorly regulated constructions in Indian cities, many of which remain outside the ambit of structural scrutiny and safety inspections.The Saket collapse is not an outlier. From Lalita Park in east Delhi (2010, 71 dead), to Thane (2013, 74 dead), to Dharwad (2019, 19 dead), to Kurla (2022, 19 dead), to Kalyan (2025, 6 dead) – the recurring elements are the same: illegal construction or alteration, substandard materials, absence of engineering supervision, and an enforcement system that intervenes only after the rubble settles.These incidents should not be viewed as isolated accidents. Rather, they highlight systemic weaknesses that exist in many Indian cities. The National Building Code provides comprehensive provisions for structural safety, fire and life safety, emergency exits, occupancy regulations, and maintenance requirements. However, the challenge often lies not in the absence of standards, but in ensuring their implementation and enforcement.Adding floorsTo understand why adding floors to an existing building is a lethal act when done without engineering oversight, one must understand how structures behave under load.Every building is designed for a specific dead load (self-weight of materials), live load (occupants and contents), and lateral load (wind and seismic forces). The columns, beams, footings, and soil beneath are sized accordingly. When a new floor is added, the cumulative load on each column increases. The footing, often a small isolated pad in informal construction, is now demanded to transfer loads it was never designed to carry. The soil beneath, which has a finite bearing capacity, begins to yield.In the Saket typology, where original construction was almost certainly non-engineered masonry or thin-column reinforced concrete, the risk was compounded at every stage of vertical addition. The column cross-sections would have been inadequate. Reinforcement detailing laps, hooks, stirrup spacing, would not have met IS 13920 requirements for ductile detailing. The foundations would have had no seismic resistance. The building, once it reached four floors, was essentially a standing contradiction of structural mechanics, sustained only by the grace of static conditions and gravity loads lower than failure threshold.The trigger can be almost anything: construction vibration from the new fifth floor, rain-induced soil softening, or the cumulative creep of over-stressed masonry.AccountabilityIndia’s building regulation framework is theoretically comprehensive. The National Building Code (NBC), now updated as the National Building Construction Standards (NBCS) 2026, provides detailed provisions on structural safety, fire and life safety, emergency exits, occupancy regulations, and maintenance requirements. States are required to adopt and enforce building bye-laws aligned with these standards. Municipal corporations are required to scrutinise building plans, issue commencement certificates, conduct construction-stage inspections, and grant occupancy certificates only after site verification.In practice, this chain is broken at almost every link.According to a broad assessment of building bye-laws and approval mechanisms, structural safety provisions formally exist. However, in practice, the building approval process often functions as a self-certification system: a structural engineer submits a structural safety certificate, a municipal authority grants approval, and official scrutiny largely ends there. Site inspections, where conducted, are generally limited to verification of architectural compliance, with little or no assessment of structural aspects due to the absence of qualified structural engineers within many local bodies. Consequently, there is rarely any independent verification of whether the structural design complies with relevant Indian Standards and the National Building Code, or whether the building is actually constructed in accordance with the approved structural drawings.In unauthorised colonies, areas that have grown outside municipal jurisdiction or that acquired regularised status without commensurate infrastructure upgradation, even this formality often does not exist. Buildings rise on the basis of local contractor experience, owner aspiration, and the quiet arrangement with whichever official is responsible for looking away.Compounding this, rural areas represent what experts have called a ‘building approval vacuum.’ In peri-urban fringes and village settlements, tehsil offices handle land-related approvals but have neither the mandate nor the technical capacity to scrutinise structural designs. A large proportion of India’s housing stock, including the masonry buildings that account for 70 to 80% of the built environment.Structural reformThe Saket collapse and its predecessors across the country are predictable output of a system that has been allowed to operate without structural accountability. Reform demands action across multiple fronts simultaneously.1. Mandatory structural audit for vertical additionsNo floor addition to any existing building, residential or commercial, should be permitted without a mandatory structural audit of the existing building by a licensed structural engineer, followed by independent third-party verification of the re-analysis2. Dedicated structural safety cells in every ULBEvery Urban Local Body (ULB) must be mandated and resourced to maintain a Structural Safety Cell staffed by qualified structural engineers. Where permanent hiring is not immediately feasible, empanelled third-party structural engineering consultancies should be authorised to conduct plan scrutiny and construction-stage inspections on behalf of ULBs. The cost of a structural inspection is trivially small compared to the cost of life loss and NDRF rescue operation.3. Digital building permit integration with structural complianceBuilding approval systems must be digitised and integrated, linking architectural approval with structural compliance checks against IS codes. Artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled platforms should automatically flag drawings that do not meet detailing requirements.4. Extend the approval mechanism to rural and peri-urban areasTehsil offices in rural areas should be equipped with technical personnel and granted delegated authority to serve as nodal building approval agencies. This require inspection teams, trained supervisors, and digital reporting tools can extend basic structural oversight to areas where no mechanism currently exists.5. A mason and contractor certification programmeA structured, accessible certification programme for masons and site supervisors, covering minimum requirement of dimensions, reinforcement and its placement, column-beam junction detailing, foundation depth, and disaster-resilient techniques. The engineer is often absent from the construction site; the mason is always there. Equipping the mason with codal knowledge is the most direct intervention available.India is not a country that lacks codes, standards, or technical knowledge, but it is a country where the distance between the written rule and the built reality has been allowed to grow so wide that it swallows lives. That distance can be closed by the sustained, unglamorous, essential work of institutional reform.Ranu Chauhan is Senior Consultant at the National Disaster Management Authority.