For residents of tower D at Chintels Paradiso society in Gurgaon’s sector 109, Thursday night was a fearful one, spent at their friends’ homes. And, what comes next, is equally uncertain.
Shweta Shrivastava (36) was in her home on the sixth floor when she heard a loud sound, which she thought might be an earthquake. In fact, the drawing room in another apartment on the same floor had caved in.
“My friend in a neighbouring building saw it happen and she called me and said, ‘Shweta, run, the building is collapsing’. I grabbed my children and raced down the stairs… We stayed the night in her house. All our belongings are in my flat; we are still wearing the clothes we were in last night,” she said.
She and her husband have been living in the flat on rent — they pay Rs 20,000 a month — for the last two years. While they will now look at shifting elsewhere, homeowners who have spent savings and taken loans to buy the flats are looking for solutions from the builder.
“For my 3,150 square feet flat, we had to pay Rs 1.8 crore, plus registration charges and overhead expenses. That was Rs 1.9 crore for a raw flat. Huge amounts were spent by everyone to then make the flats habitable. I am nearing 60 now, we spent all our savings on this. Our future looks bleak. If we have to vacate, we don’t have funds to shift elsewhere… No one from the top management has come here so far to address anything because they know that they have done wrong,” said Lalit Kapur, who lives on the 11th floor of the building.
Vipin Rana (30) was out on the lawn outside the building till 3 am, hoping to see bureaucrat Arun Srivastava, who was stuck under the rubble, being rescued safely. While Arun made it out alive, his wife Sunita died in the collapse. “I know him quite well. Till the rescue teams arrived, I and other residents had tried to find ways to get him out, but it was impossible. We already knew that his wife had died,” he said. Rana and the six members of his family slept at a friend’s house on Thursday night, but he has little idea of what the days and weeks ahead will bring.
“We haven’t been able to get our belongings from the flat; access has been closed. Even if they open it, I don’t think we will have the courage to set foot inside the building. We are trying to find a way to get the builder to give us alternate accommodation. In fact, many of us want the entire building to be demolished and built again with better construction. The entire construction is weak, which is why all this is happening,” he said.