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Three days to find the owner. Twenty-two months to name the system.
Walk an illegal building backwards, bureaucratically.
The junior engineer owes a statutory duty to inspect and report. The executive engineer and zonal officer hold stop-work and demolition powers – not requests, powers. The municipal commissioner heads a body for whom removing encroachment is an obligatory function. The SHO watched cement trucks on his beat for eighteen months. The deputy commissioner, as executive magistrate, holds public-nuisance powers and the land records. The town planner and development authority sanction plans and police deviations. Above them sit the principal secretary, the minister, and the chief minister, who in most states holds the urban portfolio or appoints the person who does.
So why fine the building laws violator? Why not the entire administration for dereliction of duty?
On 13 May 2024 a hoarding collapsed onto a petrol station in Ghatkopar, Mumbai. Seventeen people were killed, seventy-four injured.
This was not a hidden signboard in a back lane. It was a 120-foot by 120-foot steel structure – roughly nine times the 40-by-40 limit cited by Mumbai’s civic authorities – standing over a major road on land controlled by the Government Railway Police.
Three days later, police tracked the advertising company’s owner to Udaipur.
The private face of the disaster had been found. The public machinery behind it took rather longer.
In March 2026 – twenty-two months on – Maharashtra tabled the 854-page Justice Dilip Bhosale committee report, reportedly describing criminal conspiracy and regulatory failure across approvals, ignored warnings and alleged collusion between private actors and officials. The Mumbai Police chargesheet had already alleged that a weak-soil warning was ignored and that the permission generated funds for police welfare.
Read that again. On the prosecution’s own record, the structure that killed seventeen people was not merely overlooked by the state. It was producing revenue for a public authority.
Three days to find the businessman. Twenty-two months to describe the system that made his business possible.
That gap is not a footnote to the scandal. That gap is the scandal.
Illegal buildings do not hide
A pickpocket survives by not being seen. An illegal building survives by being seen and left alone.
A seven-storey structure needs excavation, concrete trucks, scaffolding, labour, power and months of visible work. It does not materialise between two inspections.
Its illegality is not a moment. It is a timeline – and a timeline can be dated and attributed to whoever held the file.
Which explains the one question nobody in authority answers: if a building is unmissable at seven storeys, it was unmissable at one. Why is it never stopped at the plinth?
Because a plinth is worthless. Nobody pays to protect a hole in the ground. Wait, though – while slabs rise, loans are drawn, flats are sold and families move in – and the price of a signature climbs with every floor.
Delay is not negligence. Delay is price discovery.
Whether the cause is corruption, political protection, cowardice or sloth, delay performs the same function: it lets an illegal act become too valuable and too populated to reverse. Then the bulldozer arrives, and the state photographs itself being decisive.
It never photographs the years of silence that made the bulldozer necessary. And by then the builder can walk. The buyer, the tenant and the vendor cannot.
The Supreme Court already wrote the manual
On 17 December 2024, in Rajendra Kumar Barjatya v. U.P. Avas Evam Vikas Parishad, the Supreme Court issued nationwide directions on unauthorised construction: approved plans displayed on site; periodic inspections supported by official records; completion and occupancy certificates only after inspection; utility connections tied to occupancy certification; trade licences withheld from unauthorised buildings; and departmental action against officials issuing wrongful certificates.
It also demolished a favourite laundering mechanism. Registration does not legalise unauthorised construction. A sale deed is not an amnesty. A tax receipt is not planning permission. And delay by authorities creates no right in the violator.
Then it did something Indian courts rarely do. In the case before it, the Court directed criminal proceedings against private parties and against the officers in charge when the constructions had come up – naming the Chief Engineer and Executive Engineer of the relevant period. It ordered departmental proceedings, made the senior-most officer personally responsible for acting, set a two-month deadline, and warned that no one was to be treated favourably.
Officers in charge at the relevant time. That is the posting register, converted into a charge sheet, by order of the Supreme Court.
The judgment was then circulated to every state and Union territory for compliance.
So the framework is not missing. It names the inspection record, the occupancy certificate, the utility connection, the trade licence and the responsible official. Every Chief Secretary in India has had it on file since December 2024.
Ask your municipality for that inspection register. See what arrives.
One essential limit. The Court’s November 2024 demolition directions require notice, hearing, a reasoned order and documentation, with personal liability for officials who flout the process. Both judgments must be read together. Measure officers by structures removed and you know exactly who gets flattened: the hawker, the tenant, the family without a lawyer. Accountability means stopping illegality early and recording every decision — not bulldozer theatre.
The chain has names, designations and dates
Walk an illegal building backwards, bureaucratically.
The junior engineer owes a statutory duty to inspect and report. The executive engineer and zonal officer hold stop-work and demolition powers – not requests, powers. The municipal commissioner heads a body for whom removing encroachment is an obligatory function. The SHO watched cement trucks on his beat for eighteen months. The deputy commissioner, as executive magistrate, holds public-nuisance powers and the land records. The town planner and development authority sanction plans and police deviations. Above them sit the principal secretary, the minister, and the chief minister, who in most states holds the urban portfolio or appoints the person who does.
That is not a mob. It is an org chart, and every box is occupied, dated, gazetted and pensionable.
Two mechanisms carry responsibility upward. First, transfers: an honest officer who acts against a protected structure is not defeated at a hearing, he is defeated in a posting order – and that machinery runs through the political executive. Second, sanction: prosecuting a public servant for official acts requires clearance from the state government.
Which means the top of the chain holds the key to the handcuffs of the bottom. The accused officer’s employer decides whether he can be tried.
Gurugram: four agencies, years late
In August 2026, four Gurugram agencies launched a major operation against roughly 300 illegal paying-guest properties, many grown into seven-storey buildings.
Seven storeys. Three hundred buildings. Four agencies.
The first question is not how many walls came down. It is: where were these agencies when floor two became floor three?
And note the trigger – waterlogging. Not the illegality, which was tolerable for years, but the water reaching people who complain effectively.
Meanwhile, an occupied illegal building typically carries an electricity meter, a water connection, a property-tax assessment and registered sale deeds. None of these legalises it. But a government that collects stamp duty, taxes and utility charges for years cannot then perform innocence about a building absent from its own records.
The same cycle plays out in the markets. Encroachments are cleared, photographed, announced. Vendors return within days. Officials have found street-cart vendors paying shopkeepers substantial monthly rent for public space – public land operating as a privately rented asset, with the enforcement drive functioning as a periodic reset.
Cleared. Reoccupied. Cleared again. If the same violation returns after every drive, the drive is not enforcement. It is scheduled maintenance of failure.
Nor are all “encroachers” equal. A vendor protected by the Street Vendors Act is not a seven-storey commercial building. Enforcement that crushes the easiest target while sparing the best-connected one is not toughness. It is cowardice with a JCB.
And consider the asymmetry. When shopkeepers allegedly obstructed a Gurugram enforcement team in 2022, an FIR followed within a day under provisions protecting public servants in the discharge of duty.
We have sections for a citizen who stops an officer doing his job. We have almost nothing for an officer who never does it.
Four cases, one accountability gap
| Case | Citizen’s cost | Private accountability | Public accountability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghatkopar hoarding | 17 killed, 74 injured | Owner apprehended in three days | Report tabled 22 months later; action against officials recommended |
| Supertech towers, Noida | Residents litigated ~10 years | Developer paid demolition costs, refunds, ₹2 crore to RWA | Officials identified; consequences still pending into 2026 |
| Maradu, Kerala | ~344 families displaced | Builders faced compensation and asset proceedings | State paid interim compensation first; attribution left to later proceedings |
| TRP Game Zone, Rajkot | 27 killed | Owners and managers prosecuted | Planning and fire officials arrested and charged; guilt remains for trial |
The pattern is not that officials are never touched. Some are suspended, transferred, charged. The pattern is that the private side is identified as a person, while the public side is described as a system.
A person can be arrested. A “systemic lapse” cannot.
Noida’s twin towers fell in seconds; residents spent a decade getting them there. Twenty-six serving and former officials were identified. By February 2026, when a departmental report found eleven responsible, seven had already retired.
That is not bad luck. That is a calendar being used as a defence lawyer.
Rajkot shows the other possibility. Planning and fire officials were arrested after the 2024 game-zone fire, on allegations that some knew of the illegality and failed to act. Those allegations await trial — but the case proves that official omission is investigable from duty, knowledge, records and inaction.
The indictment is that it took twenty-seven deaths to make anyone try.
The law can reach the officer – if the record exists
Section 198 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punishes a public servant who knowingly disobeys a legal direction intending or knowing injury is likely. Section 201 covers knowingly false official records. Neither is a conviction machine: prosecutors must prove duty, disobedience, knowledge and likely injury.
Which is exactly why the record decides everything. A geotagged inspection, a dated complaint, an unenforced stop-work notice, a false occupancy certificate, an escalation buried by a named superior – these convert outrage into evidence. Barjatya’s mandated inspection records would produce precisely that trail.
Sanction rules need precision, not exaggeration. Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act covers specified corruption investigations tied to official recommendations or decisions; it is not blanket immunity. Section 218 of the BNSS concerns cognisance in qualifying official-duty cases and carries a 120-day clock, after which sanction is deemed granted. Those clocks should be public — a safeguard must not become a dark room.
Personal recovery is not foreign either. In Lucknow Development Authority v. M.K. Gupta the Supreme Court directed that compensation be recovered proportionately from responsible officials.
And service pension rules permit withholding pension and recovering pecuniary loss for grave misconduct or negligence – but generally not for conduct beyond a four-year window.
So delay does not merely postpone the remedy. Delay destroys it. Seven retirements out of eleven is what that looks like in practice.
Build a Liability Roster
The state already knows when each inspector, engineer and commissioner took charge; when plans were filed; when utilities were connected, taxes assessed, complaints made, certificates signed.
Put those dates on one page. For every major illegal structure, publish the construction timeline, the sanctioned plan and deviations, the names and posting dates of responsible officers, inspections due versus completed, complaints and notices, utility and registration dates, the escalation trail, and the status of departmental, criminal and recovery action.
Holding a post must not create automatic guilt. Each officer should be able to show the inspection happened, the violation was reported, a stay blocked action, or a superior suppressed the file.
That protects honest officers most. Report correctly and responsibility moves upward. Bury the report and it stays with you.
No more committees investigating “the system.” Names. Duties. Dates. Documents.
Seven reforms
- Inspect at the plinth. Geotagged, timestamped inspections at foundation, structural and completion stages.
- Implement Barjatya as written — and require every Chief Secretary to publish a compliance report.
- Integrate databases. Registration, tax and utility systems must flag missing occupancy approval in language buyers cannot miss.
- Protect honest escalation. An officer who reports properly should not carry a superior’s inaction; add transfer protection with written reasons.
- Create proportionate personal recovery after due process, so the exchequer is not the automatic endpoint.
- Publish sanction clocks – request, authority, deadline, decision, reasons.
- Attack the certificate market. Swift, reviewable licence suspension for professionals issuing false safety certificates.
The question after the next collapse
After every disaster India asks: who built this?
Important – but half a question. The other half is: who was paid to stop it, what did they know, what did they do, and what followed?
Not which department. Which person. Not “systemic failure.” Which duty. Not “action will be taken.” Which action, by what date.
The template is already visible. The arrest is fast. The committee is eminent. The report is enormous. The transfer order is immediate. The prosecution file ages. The pension date approaches. And the next illegal floor goes up while the press conference is still being edited.
Until every major illegal structure produces two accountability files – one for the person who built it, one for the officials who knowingly, recklessly or corruptly allowed it – India will keep demolishing concrete while carefully preserving the system that poured it.
“Nobody” is not an answer.
“Nobody” is the product.
Frequently asked questions
Does paying property tax legalise an illegal building? No. Taxation does not replace a sanctioned plan or occupancy certificate.
Can a registered sale deed make an unauthorised flat legal? No. Registration records a transaction; it does not certify compliance with building law.
Can municipal officers be prosecuted? Potentially. Liability depends on the officer’s legal duty, knowledge, conduct, evidence and the applicable provision.
Can a building be demolished without notice? Generally no. The November 2024 directions require procedural safeguards, subject to limited exceptions and court-ordered demolitions.
General information, not legal advice. Building law varies by state and municipality.
Karnvir Mundrey is the Editor of TheFutureOfPR.com. Reach out at tfofpr@gmail.com or at +918296303806.
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