HYDERABAD: Each time a thunderstorm breaks over Hyderabad, as one did last week, Aleem Mujtaba fears the worst. He is a hardware businessman with a shop housed in a 100-year-old building in Afzalgunj. Even to the cursory look, it looks vulnerable to the fall of a leaf, let alone the lashing of rain.
But Mujtaba, 38, has no thoughts of leaving.
''I inherited this business from my father. My family has been in this business for four decades right here in this building. The question of moving out does not arise. Our livelihood is dependent on this,'' says.
There are nearly 800 buildings in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area that are in a dilapidated condition, in the threat of caving in in a thunderstom.
Two years ago, the town panning and egineering wing of GHMC carried out a survey of old buildings and detected as many as 1,800.
While many were pulled down, after much cajoling and coercing of the owners/occupants, many remain.
Circles 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 18 of GHMC account for more than 60 percent of these buildings in immediate need of demolition.
The midnight thunderstorm of last Friday brought down the roof of one such structure, fortuitously causing no fatalities, but that is always a possibility.
The trouble is occupants of such buildings are not willing to leave, for a variety of reasons. Hardware trader Balaraju, also middle-aged, who runs his shop, N B Vittal and Rao Commercial Hardware, from the same building as Mujtaba, swears he will stay till his last breath.
It's not sentiment that stops Mr Mujtaba and Mr Balaraju from pulling the building down. They would willingly do so and build anew but the other shop owners in the building are not cooperative. It's a matter of litigation.
There are other reasons too. Sixty-year-old Srinivasulu runs a hair saloon from a rundown building in Begum Bazar, says he stays because the rent is low. ''The rents in new buildings are three to four times more. It is beyond me," he says.
Old structures caving in is a monsoon season phenomenon every year. As is the annual diktat issued by GHMC to owners of dilapidated buildings to move out. After last week's rains, GHMC boss B Janardhan Reddy got going again, telling his staff to put the GHMC's demolition crews on alert.
The problem with old buildings is that many of them have excavated cellars, which weakens the structure. Another regular source of monsoon fatalities is the failure to take precautions in the case of RCC retaining walls.
Notices are slapped on such buildings regularly under Section 456 and 459 of the HMC Act but all further action runs into a wall of owner reluctance, so to speak. There are disputes between tenants and owners and among co-owners, court litigation and sentimental considerations.
Some 250 crumbling buildings have been brought by the GHMC in the last four years, but it's always a struggle against owner inertia of decades, sometimes even a century.