Plan untraced, legality of extra floors questioned

KOLKATA: One common element that links Bagri Market to Stephen Court, the Park Street property that suffered a devastating blaze in 2010, also highlights the single-biggest irregularity in Kolkata’s construction business: the mysterious addition of entire floors in prime real-estate zones.



The developer, whose role in the construction of additional floors in Stephen Court came under scanner after the 2010 fire, also added two floors to Bagri Market, a TOI investigation revealed.

Even more curiously, there was no trace of the market’s original plan — sanctioned around 1948 — till Monday evening. Kolkata Municipal Corporation officials struggled to trace the plan as firemen struggled to control the Bagri Market blaze two days after it started. KMC building department officials have been trying to track the sanction plan as it will tell them whether the Bagri Market additional floors were illegal.

The illegal addition of floors, say KMC officials, besides being one of the biggest problems in the city’s construction industry, is also one of the critical factors that add to a building’s fire risk. “These additional floors set back fire-fighting efforts and, often, make the difference between a long struggle to douse flames and a quick end to a fire,” a senior KMC official told TOI.

Owners at fault on two counts: Cops

The focus of the police probe, as of now, is on the owners. The primary fire brigade and police report submitted to the group of ministers in Nabanna faulted the owners on two counts: non-functional fire safety equipment and illegal sale of every square feet space available in the market. “The building was congested and firefighters couldn’t reach the fourth floor because there were shops even on the staircase. Even the toilets were given on rent,” the police report stated.

As the fire spread to the fifth and sixth floors on Monday, cops looking into the market’s history discovered that the 50,000 square feet — spread over these two floors — were added between 1986 and 1989, three-and-ahalf decades after the initial G+4 construction. The two new floors were sold to 300 persons on 99 years’ lease. Bagri Estates (P) Ltd, the holding company that owns the rest of the market, has only maintenance rights of these two floors.

The developer, thought to be behind the additional floors at Bagri Market and Stepehen Court, is believed to have constructed new floors in over 100 properties in the city’s CBD between 1984 and 1991, several of them allegedly without KMC sanction. TOI tried to reach out to the developer but failed.