A four-storey residential building tagged “dangerous” by civic authorities in 2020 collapsed in Bhiwandi’s Balaji Nagar late on July 30, killing at least nine people while illegal repair work was underway inside, according to Business Today and Oneindia. The building’s B wing came down around 11:30 pm, roughly two hours after residents reported hearing cracking sounds. Six to seven people remained unaccounted for under the debris as rescue crews worked through the night, and officials cautioned the toll could rise further.

A hazard flagged years before it failed

The Kohinoor Building, a decade-old structure of 48 rooms across four floors, had been on the Bhiwandi-Nizampur Municipal Corporation’s dangerous-buildings list since 2020. Rather than being vacated and rebuilt, it was undergoing repair work at the time of the collapse, which reports say was illegal and was the immediate trigger for the structural failure. Most of the dead were reportedly repair workers still inside the building when it gave way; residents who had already been evacuated after the cracking sounds began described the structure coming down “just a few minutes after we came out,” per Oneindia’s report citing the municipal commissioner.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis ordered an immediate FIR and directed the municipal commissioner to pursue strict action against those responsible, Business Today reported. NDRF units, the Thane Disaster Response Force, local fire brigade and police used heavy earth-moving equipment and sniffer dogs through the night to search the rubble, alongside ambulances and fire engines staged for the injured.

Why this keeps happening in Bhiwandi

Bhiwandi’s building stock is unusually old and dense, much of it built decades ago to house the town’s powerloom workforce, and its municipal corporation has flagged dozens of structures as dangerous in past monsoon surveys without a reliable mechanism to force vacation or demolition before residents return to patch them up. A “dangerous” tag on paper has repeatedly proven no match for a family or landlord unwilling to abandon a home or income property, especially when repair, however unauthorised, looks cheaper than resettlement. This collapse follows a familiar pattern across Thane district’s older housing stock during the monsoon, when saturated walls and foundations are most likely to fail.

What it means for residents

For families living in Bhiwandi’s other buildings carrying the same dangerous tag, the collapse is a reminder that a civic notice alone changes nothing without enforcement, and that repair work continuing on a structure already flagged as unsafe can turn a warning into a death toll. For the wider municipal corporation, Fadnavis’s directive for an immediate FIR puts pressure on local officials who allowed repair work to continue on a building they themselves had already declared hazardous, raising the question of who signed off, or looked away, while it happened.

Outlook

Watch for the FIR’s findings on who authorised or ignored the illegal repair work, since that will determine whether this becomes a case of individual negligence or exposes a wider gap in how BNCMC tracks and acts on its own dangerous-building list. With Maharashtra’s monsoon still active, other tagged structures across Bhiwandi and Thane district remain the immediate concern for civic inspectors in the coming weeks.

Sources: Business Today, Oneindia

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.