future tense?

Cuttack, April 15: Spread over the moderate seismic zone of the Mahanadi river delta, Cuttack sits on a shaky foundation, but that hardly seems to perturb the city’s planners.

Two years ago, the Bureau of Indian Standards graded the city as seismic zone III after which the Centre and the United Nations Development Programme included it under the Urban Earthquake Vulnerability Reduction Project. But since then there has been little progress.

“Nothing tangible has happened since the first meeting. As things have progressed over the past two years, it wouldn’t be surprising to find the same situation during the third meeting two years hence,” said special relief commissioner N.K. Sunderay after attending the City Disaster Management Committee meeting a few days ago.

The Committee constituted under the Government of India-UNDP project in January 2005 had decided to identify the vulnerable areas in the city by video mapping. An Earthquake Enforcement Committee (EEC) was expected to identify buildings that are unsafe, and those that have architectural and infrastructure defects.

The owners of the buildings identified by the committee would then have been asked to dismantle them or make architectural corrections at their own cost.

The Cuttack Development Authority (CDA) apparently has neither a mechanism nor an agency to check seismic resistance capability of the new buildings. The meeting found that CDA does not inspect buildings for these standards. It relies on certificates of private engineers, appointed and paid by the builders themselves, raising serious doubts over the certification process.

“There should be a governmental system to check for quake resistance. In the present scenario, the CDA could pass the buck for faulty construction to the private engineers. But it could not do so if it was made responsible for structural inspection,” said a senior CDA official requesting anonymity.

Significantly, the Urban Earthquake Vulnerability Reduction Project had not undertaken any measure for checking the seismic resistance capability of the new buildings that are fast coming up across the city.