Satya Niketan building collapse: India has rules, but why does structural safety still fail?

Seven lives were lost when a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan collapsed on September 6. It was, by most accounts, an ordinary structure of the kind that exists by the thousand around India’s college campuses—a residential building quietly repurposed to accommodate paying guests, mostly students, in rooms the structure was never designed to hold.

Within days, the Supreme Court signalled that building safety across the country warranted closer scrutiny. The Delhi High Court has since directed the Municipal Corporation of Delhi to conduct a high-level inquiry, including verification of the construction permissions on record. This is a welcome and necessary response. But it also raises a larger question, one that extends well beyond this particular building: how does India move from reacting to collapses to preventing them?

The problem is not a lack of rules

The honest answer is that India does not suffer from a shortage of rules. The National Building Code, state and municipal bye-laws, fire-safety norms and structural-stability requirements together provide a reasonably comprehensive framework on paper. Delhi’s own building bye-laws prescribe requirements ranging from floor-area ratios to structural certification before occupancy.

The gap is not in drafting rules; it is in translating them into practice, turning a requirement on paper into a routine followed at every construction site. That gap persists because, for many builders and property owners, non-compliance remains an economically rational choice.

When non-compliance pays

Consider the arithmetic from the perspective of someone converting a residential building into a paying-guest accommodation. Obtaining a change-of-use sanction, commissioning a structural-safety certificate, and complying with fire-escape and occupancy norms all involve time and money. By contrast, bypassing these requirements may cost very little, particularly when the likelihood of detection is low and the consequences, even when violations are identified, are not severe enough to outweigh the rental income already generated.

When the expected cost of violating a rule is lower than the cost of complying with it, compliance inevitably becomes the exception rather than the norm. This is true not only of construction law but of regulatory failure more broadly: incentives, rather than intentions, are often misaligned.

Fixing this does not require reinventing the wheel. Several jurisdictions have redesigned their building-safety regimes specifically to make deterrence real rather than merely notional.

The United Kingdom’s Building Safety Act, introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire, created what is known as a 'golden thread' of information, a continuous and traceable digital record of every safety-relevant decision concerning a building, from design and construction through occupation.

It also assigns a named 'Accountable Person' who carries continuing legal responsibility for the building’s safety, rather than responsibility ending when an approval or certificate is issued.

Singapore requires buildings above a certain age to undergo periodic structural inspections by licensed professionals who are personally and professionally accountable for their certifications, backed by a regulator with the power to suspend licences. New York City’s façade inspection programme similarly requires recurring structural checks, with escalating financial penalties—including liens on the property- for owners who fail to comply.

What unites these systems is not harsher rhetoric but clearer institutional design. Responsibility is assigned to a specific person at each stage; that responsibility does not disappear once a certificate is issued; and the consequences of cutting corners are made sufficiently serious and sufficiently probable to influence behaviour.

India’s own legal tradition offers relatively little precedent for this kind of deterrence. Courts have historically placed greater emphasis on compensatory damages—sums intended to restore a victim’s actual loss than on punitive damages designed to punish and deter. That approach has its own logic, but it also means that the law rarely imposes a cost for negligent construction that exceeds the profit derived from it.

I have argued elsewhere, including in Unshackling the Elephant: Transforming Indian Law, Culture and Economy, while examining India’s contract and tort law more broadly, that this reluctance to make penalties truly consequential is one of the quieter reasons why non-compliance continues to pay across sectors, not only in construction. A safety framework that is intended to be taken seriously must carry consequences that are felt, not merely recorded.

Accountability must run through the entire chain

The paying-guest and private-hostel sector illustrates why accountability also needs to extend across the entire chain rather than being concentrated at a single point.

These buildings are frequently sanctioned as ordinary residential units and only later, informally, converted into multi-occupancy accommodation without the corresponding change-of-use approval, without a revised fire-safety clearance, and often without anyone verifying whether the structure can safely bear the demands of its new occupancy.

Oversight is divided among municipal authorities, the fire department and the police, but no single authority necessarily owns the problem from beginning to end. Meanwhile, students living in these properties are rarely in a position to verify a building’s legal status or structural safety before signing a rent agreement.

A single named authority responsible for licensing and periodically re-certifying student accommodation, much as hotels and hospitals are subject to licensing and regulatory requirements, could close much of this gap.

From reactive audits to preventive safety

None of this requires waiting for another tragedy or another new law. What it requires is a shift in how the existing system operates.

India should consider standardising norms specifically for the PG and hostel sector; creating digital, publicly searchable records of approvals and inspections so that responsibility cannot be diffused after the fact; and requiring structural audits at fixed intervals rather than only after something goes wrong.

The judiciary has, in this instance, acted quickly and created a genuine opportunity for systemic reform. Whether that opportunity becomes a one-time audit or evolves into a permanent institutional practice will depend on whether India is willing to redesign the incentives, rather than simply tighten the rules.

Every city has its own version of Satya Niketan buildings where small shortcuts accumulate quietly until they become a serious risk. The lesson worth taking from this tragedy is therefore not simply that the rules need to be stricter; instead, safety must be built into the design of the system itself, rather than appended to it after the fact.

(The author is a Senior Partner, AP & Partners; Co-Founder of Trilegal)

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.