'The Madman act' of Demolition

On August 31st, the supreme court passed a landmark judgement and ordered the demolition of Supertech's two 40-storey towers in Noida in the name of illegal activities. This is one of the headlines that struck my eyes in the last week. I immediately started drawing parallels with another familiar case in Kerala which ended up in demolition, 'The Maradu Case'. To give you a brief background, in January 2020, four apartment complexes in Maradu, a suburb of Kochi city, were razed down following a Supreme Court order for being built violating the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules.

Ok, let me put it out there. As an architect, I don't really understand demolition. Is it the solution to fighting real estate corruption and building rules violations? It is a humongous waste of time, manpower, money, and resources and one of the most pathetic ways of dealing with socio-political issues, corruption, and violation in the real estate industry.

Yes, there is a lot of illegal construction and other activities in the real estate sector. But, once something so gigantic as a 40-storey twin tower is built, what is the point of breaking it all down? The Supreme Court of India passed a landmark judgement on August 31st to demolish the twin tower. The court roped in Mr Sharad B Sarwate who guided the demolition of Maradu apartments to understand the process of tearing down a building. I understand demolition if the building in question is of inferior quality when it comes to its structure and could pose a threat to the lives of people. But the Supreme Court wants to set this case as a precedent to avoid any further violations. I believe we can devise way better solutions or intervene at an early stage.

The only thing that comes to my mind when I read about such cases is the folklore of 'Naranath Bhrandan' (The madman of Naranam). There is a story I heard as a child that he used to roll a big stone up a hill and then let it fall back down in a repeated cycle as an act of madness. These cases of demolition are also similar. Taking all the effort and time to roll it up and in a split second mindlessly rolling it back down, and building something into a full structure and tearing it down just like that. It's pretty much the same.

Moreover, this is highly unsustainable and polluting as well. In the case of Maradu, the demolition was done as there were CRZ rules violations with many other aspects. The demolition of the four waterfront apartment buildings in Maradu has produced about 76,250 tonnes of debris. The demolition debris remained in Vembanad lake for around six months and was removed only after a protest. The amount of construction waste and demolition debris that landed right into the water and the surroundings, and the vibrations caused in the whole area and the overall effect of this controlled implosion on the micro-environment defeats the purpose and worsen the damage.

Demolition is just a one-off solution to controlling corruption and violations of rules. We need measures that can decrease the rate of corruption from the inside and stronger monitoring by bodies like RERA in making sure the builders adhere to the rules and regulations.

For the cases, where these structures have already been built, we could use a different approach. Urban Design and urbanism is not so big in India yet. But, we could use it in such cases and thoughtfully avoid the damage caused by unnecessary demolition of healthy buildings. Reusing and upcycling the buildings can be one of the solutions. The government can take over these kinds of cases and hand them over to responsible organisations, charge a percentage of the income generated by the building as a fine or pose hefty penalties rather than simply destructing it. My suggestion is that we need to bring in a panel of experts like environmentalists, urban designers, architects and civil engineers together, assess the possibilities of recycling the building and restoring it with different functions to solve the issue.

So my thoughts are, either we intervene early or we act smartly and collaboratively rather than going for a full-fledged destruction process.