Two children died and eight are missing after a fire tore through over 400 shanties in Lucknow, hours after which another blaze destroyed 300 shanties in Ghaziabad.

There were no reports of casualties in Ghaziabad, where the blaze erupted around noon on Thursday. The fire at Sector 14 in Lucknow’s Vikas Nagar broke out late on Wednesday night.

The majority of the residents of both affected areas are women who work as
house helps.

According to victims of the Lucknow fire, over 1,000 women, 300 children and 200 men were sleeping in the shanties when the fire broke out in several pockets of the slum around 9pm on Wednesday.

Swati Kumari and Ayushi Kumari, both aged 2 years, were burnt alive. Over 40 goats also perished.

On Thursday morning, the victims hurled stones at the house of a builder who claims to be the owner of the land where the slum-dwellers had settled without permission.

“It is a three-bigha plot on which we have been living for the last 25 years. Initially, we thought it was government land but two years ago, a builder who had a house near the plot said it was his land and we should vacate it. He had been visiting our shanties almost every day for the past week and mounting pressure on us to leave,” a slum-dweller said.

The police said at least 100 LPG cylinders exploded as the fire spread, gradually taking the entire area down.