It was scarcely a rumble at first. Like some distant cloudburst. I thought someone was shifting furniture on the upper floor. Then when it hit, there was no time to escape. Within seconds the ceiling had tilted and taken down the front wall with it. We were staring into the street and to the school opposite. My roommate and I ran out, and saw the whole structure crumble before our eyes. It was eerily quiet; then the screams started”. This is how Frank Smithson, an American exchange student in China, described the catastrophic quake in Sichuan province. It took barely 30 seconds for 20,000 buildings to self-destruct and leave an estimated 50,000 dead.

Oddly, a disproportionately large number of schools collapsed as a result of faulty construction practice in the region’s government-funded projects. In Yinhua, a woman who lost her 13-yr old daughter complained that the school building had illegally added two more floors. “When it collapsed it crumbled into fragments. That shows just how it was built”. Local residents call such buildings Tofu construction, as soft as soybean curd. In Dujiangyan, near the quake’s epicentre, a secondary school collapsed while surrounding structures suffered little damage. Among the 20,000 buildings destroyed throughout the region, 700 were schools. Petitions circulating in several Chinese towns in the province are now demanding the arrest of builders responsible for such construction.

The scene has an all too familiar echo at home. Builders in Gujarat, once inundated with similar accusations and a flurry of legal cases, took the quick and painless route out: they settled out of court, so they could resume their work. Today many of the illegal constructions that collapsed during the 2001 quake have been replaced by more illegal constructions. Who among the new residents of the multitudes of highrises in Ahmedabad is in a position to check on the seismic flaws of their own building?

... contd.