Builders draw court ire over rickety building in Delhi

After Economic Offences Wing (EOW) slapped additional charges in a 2008 case of rickety building construction in Greater Kailash-I, a court has summoned its construction firms, builders and a chartered accountant (CA) as accused. Drawing an analogy with the Laxmi Nagar building collapse that killed over 70 people, a court hearing the case in 2010 said “the building is situated in a thickly-populated urban colony, having probable danger to human habitation in the neighbourhood,” and called for “necessary action” from the police. Delhi Police subsequently arrested builder Avdhesh Mittal and chargesheeted him in connection with the the GK-I building constructed in 2006. The property’s owner and complainant, Rajinder Chhabra, claimed that the structure be demolished as the builder had used “inferior quality material” that led to seepage and, as a consequence, cracks in the building. Chhabra said he had entered into an agreement in 2005 with a real estatecompany and its three directors for a strong, earthquake-proof, three-storeyed house on his 500-square-yard plot. In its supplementary chargesheet, filed before chief metropolitan magistrate Sandeep Garg, EOW highlighted Mittal’s role in the case, saying, “It is evident that his intention from the very beginning was to grab the entire property and extort money from the complainant.” To achieve these “illegal motives”, the chargesheet stated, Mittal “committed various unlawful acts, and obtained wrongful gains and also inflicted wrongful losses on the complainant”.