Delhi orders inquiry into a collapse that killed four, with demolition next door suspected

Home Minister Ashish Sood ordered the inquiry on Friday, October 30, and assigned it to the District Magistrate (North-East), according to an official statement carried by PTI. The house, numbered E-402, came down at about 3 p.m. on October 7. It stood on a plot of roughly 20 to 25 square yards, or about 180 to 225 square feet.

Early checks on the ground, as the government describes them, suggest that heavy machines tearing down a structure on an unauthorized construction site next door shook the house until it failed. That finding is preliminary. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi found three neighboring buildings badly damaged and unsafe, and their residents were moved out. The Tribune reported that the first assessment also raised doubts about other homes in the area, many of them squeezed onto tiny plots with too few columns or beams.

Police first said five bodies had been recovered, then put the toll at four on October 8 and sent remains from the debris for DNA testing. Among the dead is a child of about three or four who had not been identified. Rescuers pulled eight people out alive; police said they were stable at Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital in Tahirpur.

The magistrate will look for breaches of building rules by owners, tenants and other private parties, and for failures by government departments and city agencies. The inquiry is to propose legal action against anyone it finds at fault. The inquiry will also review how the Disaster Management Act, 2005 is being applied. No deadline was announced, and the reports did not say who was running the demolition.