"Unsafe? But this is all we can afford"

In an effort to prevent the recurrence of the Malad crash, the BMC has given the residents a deadline until 3 pm on Saturday to vacate the building. Many residents admit that they will finally be forced to move after holding out for years against the BMC’s warning notices posted annually on their building. Their stay in the decaying building was marked by frequent collapses of balconies and staircases.

"Vacating thebuilding is the simplest solution, but what is the alternative?" asks civil engineer and former Congress MLA Chandrakant Gosalia. He said that alternatives to house the 100-odd residents of the building in a municipal school were being tried out. But residents are not unenthusiastic about the prospect of shifting into halls and transit camps.

At the Hajigani Ahmed building near Chor Bazar, Pramod Borkar narrates the experience of transit camps. Residents of the building, which partially collapsed last June, were asked to shift to camps in Borivili and Sion.

"There were no doors, windows, ceilings or plaster in the transit camps we were shown last year," he says. Some of the residents found that rooms allotted to them had already been occupied by other persons. Others who opted to stay there had to reckon with unpaid electricity bills of previous occupants.

The 34 families living in the tottering BMC-owned Bhatiyara House near Mohammed Ali Road have also been living dangerously for nearly a decade."We’ve been asked to vacate by the BMC several times," says elderly housewife Fatima Shaikh. "But where do we go?".

On Wednesday, senior BMC officials admitted that the corporation did not have enough transit camps to house all the persons living in dilapidated buildings. A vast majority of the approximately 18,000 cessed buildings in the island city are in bad shape with at least 30 of them figuring in the MHADA’s annual pre-monsoon list of dangerously dilapidated buildings.

Syed-ur Rahman’s wife and three daughters now live in Basti, UP. Rahman, Imam of the mosque near Bhatiyara house, shifted his family out of his one-room dwelling in the building six months ago after the floor began bulging and cracks began appearing in its walls.

"I barely earn Rs 2000 per month, rents for a room here cost that much," sighs the Imam whose family lived with friends and relatives before heading back to their native place.

Propped up with bamboo stilts the century-old rotten wood-frame building has been steadilyshedding its cement and plaster over the last few years. Residents say their pleas to the BMC to repair the building have fallen on deaf ears. Ironically ten persons in the building are gainfully employed as drivers, teachers, ward boys and peons with the BMC.

The residents who had been asked to shift to a transit camp in the Ramabai Nagar, Ghatkopar, refused on the grounds that the accommodation was sub-standard.