The recent fire at a bed-and-breakfast in Hauz Rani near Malviya Nagar, another fatal blaze in Tughlaqabad, and the reported collapse of a five-storey building in the Champa Gali-Saidul Ajaib stretch near Saket should not be treated as isolated accidents. They are warnings from a city that has continued to depend on its former villages while failing to govern them with clarity, fairness, or urgency.
The locations matter. Hauz Rani, Tughlaqabad, and Saidul Ajaib are not merely neighbourhoods near better-known south Delhi landmarks. They are part of Delhi’s urban village landscape: old settlements surrounded, compressed, and transformed by the capital’s expansion.
These places now house paying guest accommodations, small hotels, cafés, restaurants, coaching centres, shops, rental rooms and informal workspaces. They are essential to Delhi’s economy, but remain trapped in a planning grey zone.
After the Malviya Nagar fire, in which more than 20 people were reported to have died, Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena suggested recruiting Agniveers as firefighters to address staff shortages in the Delhi Fire Service. The proposal may respond to one visible gap in emergency response.
But the deeper problem begins much earlier than the arrival of firefighters. A fire tender reaching late, or struggling to enter a narrow lane, is often the last stage of a failure produced over years. I believe we must address the root cause rather than reactionary measures, damage control or mere optics. We need to look for permanent solutions to tackle this time bomb of this wicked problem.
That failure lies in land-use confusion, weak building scrutiny, poor fire access, overloaded electricity systems, commercialisation without safety upgrades, and a governance structure in which responsibility is scattered across multiple agencies.
Turning Urban Villages into Destinations
Delhi’s urban villages occupy a strange position in the city’s imagination. Hauz Khas Village, Shahpur Jat, Mehrauli, Chhatarpur, Humayunpur, Khirki, Munirka, Neb Sarai, Saidul Ajaib, Mahipalpur, Ghitorni, Sultanpur, Kotla Mubarakpur and Khanpur all tell different versions of the same story. The planned city expanded around them, drew value from them, and then described their growth as disorder.
Many of Delhi’s most desirable restaurants, designer stores, galleries, cafés, coaching centres and rental units operate in areas where legal status and planning categories remain difficult to navigate. Their informality is not incidental to their success. It is often what makes them affordable, adaptable and commercially viable.
Hauz Khas Village was among the first to acquire glamour. By the 2000s, it had become a shorthand for Delhi’s creative class, with boutiques, galleries, bars and restaurants operating out of old village houses. What appeared as cultural renewal also carried obvious risks. Cafés and pubs came up on upper floors. Narrow staircases became emergency exits. Buildings designed as homes began carrying loads and uses they were never meant to handle.
As rents rose in Hauz Khas, the urban village economy moved elsewhere. Shahpur Jat became a fashion cluster. Mehrauli became a destination for high-end hospitality and bridal couture. Chhatarpur’s Dhan Mill moved from an alternative design address towards an expensive consumption space. Humayunpur became one of Delhi’s distinctive food neighbourhoods. Kotla Mubarakpur, Ghitorni and Sultanpur developed commercial identities around hardware, building materials, furniture and factory outlets.
Other villages did not become lifestyle destinations. Ayanagar, Khanpur, and parts of Saidul Ajaib remained marked by broken roads, waterlogging, cramped rentals and civic neglect. But whether polished or ignored, the safety question remained the same: who is responsible when village homes become dense rental blocks, commercial establishments or guest houses?
The Many Masters of Delhi’s Urban Land
Delhi’s urban land governance is split across several institutions. Municipal bodies deal with building bye-laws and local services. The Delhi Development Authority controls land use and zoning through the master plan. The police step in after criminal liability arises. Disaster management authorities respond after a fire, collapse or flood. Revenue officials hold another layer of land records and local oversight. Courts may take notice, but judicial proceedings do not always translate into timely administrative action.
This fragmentation creates a familiar pattern.
When a building violates land-use norms, one agency can point to another. When it violates structural norms, responsibility shifts again. When residents complain, they are moved from one office to the next. When tragedy occurs, the language changes quickly to inquiry, compensation, rescue and culpability. By then, the warning signs are already visible in ash or rubble.
The problem is not that Delhi lacks rules. Actually, it has too many of rules and regulations. The problem is that rules are unevenly enforced, poorly explained and often detached from the lived reality of the settlements they govern. In many urban villages, families must navigate zoning categories, floor-area-ratio restrictions, water and electricity permissions, mutation records, ownership disputes, building sanctions, regularisation policies and court orders simply to maintain or develop property that has often been in their families for generations.
There is also an institutional incentive to avoid difficult decisions. Land disputes in Delhi can outlast officers, governments and generations. A District Magistrate, Municipal Commissioner or senior official posted for a short tenure may inherit files that are decades old. Any decisive intervention can invite litigation, political pressure, allegations of bias or accusations of corruption. Preserving the status quo often becomes the safest administrative option.
This caution may be understandable at the level of the individual officer.Its cumulative effect is dangerous. Extra floors continue to remain occupied. Weak structures continue to earn rent. Commercial activity continues to expand into residential lanes. Drainage systems continue to fail. Power cables continue to multiply overhead. Fire access continues to disappear. Public space continues to shrink.
The city continues to wait until a collapse, blaze or court order forces temporary action.
A City Seen Only in Crisis
The residents know this rhythm well. The state appears before elections, before major visits, after accidents, during demolition drives or when land values make an area newly attractive. It is far less visible in the slow work that prevents disaster: mapping buildings, widening emergency access, upgrading drains, checking electrical load, enforcing fire norms, simplifying approvals, supporting retrofitting and giving small property owners a realistic path to compliance.
These settlements are not outside the state. Municipal taxes are collected. Electricity metres are issued. Gas pipelines are installed. Voter identity cards are registered. Water connections, however irregular, exist. People pay the state in many ways, but when safety fails, the same state can treat them as occupants of an exception.
That exception houses the city’s workforce.
Students preparing for entrance exams, first-generation office workers, nurses, delivery workers, sales staff, young couples, single women, migrants from the North East, divorced people, queer people seeking anonymity and families priced out of planned colonies often find shelter in urban villages. These are not marginal to Delhi’s economy. They are the people who keep the city moving.
The planned city has not made adequate room for them. Older government-built colonies, once meant for working and middle-class life, are now unaffordable to many workers. Gated colonies are guarded not only by walls and security booths but also by class, caste, marital status and social suspicion. In urban villages, landlords may still carry prejudice, but the economics of rent often creates a narrow opening. It is not equality. It is convenience. Yet for many, even convenience becomes shelter.
A Housing Crisis
This is why condemnation alone is insufficient. To call these buildings illegal without asking why they exist is to protect the idea of planning while ignoring the exclusions produced by it. People do not live in unsafe structures because they prefer risk. They live there because legal, safe and well-located housing is beyond reach. If the formal city cannot house those who study, clean, cook, deliver, guard, build and service it, informality will continue to fill the gap.
At the same time, affordability cannot become an excuse for danger. A room that is cheap because the building may collapse is not social justice. A guest house that operates without fire exits is not entrepreneurship.
A landlord who keeps adding floors on weak columns is not merely responding to demand; he is gambling with lives. A contractor who builds without engineering checks, an official who looks away, and a system that allows occupation without safety all share responsibility.
Much construction in these areas happens through informal expertise. A mason becomes a contractor after years on site. A two-storey house is demolished and replaced by a six-storey rental block. Columns are raised, rooms are split, terraces are enclosed, basements are used and commercial loads are added without proper structural assessment. In some lanes, a fire tender cannot enter. In others, a building with dozens of occupants depends on a staircase barely wide enough for daily use, let alone evacuation.
The fear is not abstract. Anyone who has walked through these lanes has seen electric wires hanging low, gas cylinders stacked near kitchens, drains overflowing near foundations, old walls carrying new floors and signboards covering façades that were once family homes. Disaster is visible before it happens. What is missing is the authority willing and able to intervene before grief becomes evidence.
A Strange Contradiction
A serious response must begin by admitting that urban villages are not temporary irregularities. They are permanent parts of Delhi’s housing, cultural and commercial fabric. Treating them as embarrassments to be hidden, demolished or selectively regularised has failed. The city needs a safety-first framework that recognises residents and businesses while enforcing non-negotiable standards.
That would mean documented building records, structural audits, fire-risk mapping, electrical safety checks, emergency access plans, drainage upgrades, realistic retrofitting schemes and clear responsibility between agencies. It would also require affordable legal pathways for small property owners trapped between unclear rules and expensive approvals. Enforcement cannot mean only sealing and demolition after decades of neglect. It must include prevention, technical support and accountability for officials who ignore repeated warnings.
Recruiting more firefighters may strengthen emergency response, but it cannot substitute for safer buildings, accessible lanes and functioning regulation. Fire safety cannot begin after the smoke is visible. It begins with planning, approvals, inspection, wiring, ventilation, escape routes and the refusal to normalise risk.
Delhi also needs more planners, engineers, architects, public policy professionals and local historians in the governance process.
Urban villages cannot be understood only through files or satellite maps. Their land histories, caste geographies, rental economies, sacred sites, old pathways and informal institutions shape how they function. Regulation designed without this knowledge either fails or becomes punitive.
The larger question is political. A developed India cannot be built on unsafe rentals, collapsing drains, unregulated construction and selective legality. The idea of Viksit Bharat by 2047 will remain incomplete if the urban villages that house workers, students, entrepreneurs and small businesses remain trapped between extraction and neglect. A developed capital requires developed villages within it: safe, serviced, walkable, accountable and recognised.
I have often noticed a strange contradiction. When government officials return from training workshops in Europe, they speak admiringly of how villages there preserve their heritage, architecture, and local character. But the same imagination is rarely extended to the villages we have here in Delhi, Noida, Gurugram, or Chandigarh.
What is celebrated abroad as heritage is treated here as encroachment, backwardness or a planning inconvenience. Their village lanes become “historic streets”; ours become “congested”. Their old houses become “vernacular architecture”; ours are left to collapse or be demolished. Their communities are studied; ours are managed.
Our villages also carry memory, architecture and community life. They too deserve to be understood before they are judged, altered or erased. Maybe the real gap is not that we admire European villages, but that we have not learnt to look at our own with the same patience and care.
The fires in Hauz Rani and Tughlaqabad, and the collapse near Saket, should not become another short-lived news cycle. They should force Delhi to ask why its most productive and inclusive spaces are also among its least protected. The answer lies not in one bad building, one negligent owner or one delayed fire tender, but in a system that has normalised ambiguity because ambiguity serves everyone until it kills someone.
(Puneet Singh Singhal is a Disability Inclusion & Climate Justice Advocate, Co-founder of Billion Strong and Founder/Curator of the Green Disability & Dilli Dehat Project. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)