Manik Chand Sethia, a director of the company that owns Nandaram Market, told Metro on Tuesday that it was ready to pull down the building and rebuild it according to norms.

“If the building is really unsafe, we will pull it down,” said Sethia, the director of Brabourne Properties Pvt Ltd, which is managing the building since 1999.

Sethia, like the traders of the market, is against the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC)’s proposed demolition drive at Nandaram, which was declared illegal by the high court in 1997.

The civic body has said the building, ravaged by a 100-hour fire in January, has to be razed for the sake of safety.

“How can they say the building is unsafe? There has not been a single structural stability assessment since the fire more than two months ago,” said a trader.

Mayoral council member (building) Dipankar Dey said the civic body had written to the head of IIT Kharagpur’s civil engineering department a month ago, requesting him to conduct tests on the building. “We got acknowledgement from the IIT but they are yet to send a team over.”

Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya said: “If the building is razed to the ground and a sanction issued for a 12-storeyed structure, the court order won’t come in the way.”

This was the course of action after a fire ravaged Manohar Das Katra, a stone’s throw from Nandaram, in the mid-1990s.

Officials of the Nandaram Market Disaster Management Welfare Committee, which has been representing the traders, told Metro that more than half of the 1,000 shopkeepers have not been able to open their shops since the fire.