Said N V Salunke, who flocked to Navi Mumbai in the eighties like several among middle-class Mumbai for a dream flat in a ``planned'' township, ``People laugh at us when we tell them about our collapsing houses. But I can't afford to take things lightly anymore. Not when I know the peril my family is at, living in a dangerous structure like this.''

Their flat in building no 26, among 53 structures in JN-1 (10 buildings) and JN-2 (43) in Sector 10 in Vashi is cracking up under the weight of poor construction and maintenance. In most of the buildings, built as recently as 1984, the plaster has peeled off; the walls, columns and beams are cracked, leaving the steel of the frame exposed.

Due to this, says Ganesh Punnu, a resident ofbuilding no 26, windows and doors no longer fit the frames they were meant for. ``Initially, we tried scraping the wood off the doors to get them to fit the frames, but how long can we keep doing this?'' asked Punnu.

And in building no 24, the staircase has developed a bulge, narrowing down scarce space. The leaking drain pipes have weakened the walls and infested them with moss. Jaywant Gawde, resident of building no 23, added, ``The cracks in our building started developing five years ago. But we started getting really worried about 8-10 days ago, when the slabs began sinking.''

The warning signs in the building complex were sounded soon after the buildings were constructed. In 1985, recalls Gawde, just a year after residents moved into building no 35, it developed cracks so wide that people could peep in from the street to see what was going on inside. An embarrassed CIDCO stepped in and got the entire building replastered. Not that the effort shows: the brickwork and metal are still visible.

Harriedresidents have formed an owners' association to pressurise the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) or CIDCO into setting their buildings right. But the buck is being tossed between the NMMC and CIDCO. While CIDCO claims that the damage has been done by poor maintenance and illegal additions to the buildings, the civic body says CIDCO is responsible for the condition of the buildings. Municipal Commissioner Subhashchandra Bakhare told Express Newsline, ``CIDCO is responsible totally for all liabilities since it has built the structures.''

Countered CIDCO chairperson Narayan Marathe, ``A building needs on-going maintenance and care, which none of the residents seems to have thought of as important. In fact, several residents have built illegal additions to the original structure, leading to an uneven distribution of weight on the buildings columns.''

Following a morcha by residents in early 1997 to the CIDCO office, the corporation appointed a committee headed by R G Limaye of the Department ofCivic Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai to study structural problems in the JN-1 and JN-2 type buildings. The Limaye committee made some trenchant observations on the planning and construction of the buildings.

Marathe, however, parried questions on why CIDCO had done nothing about the committee's recommendations, instead saying, ``We are going to shift some of the families to a transit camp to undertake repairs in the worst affected buildings.''