No 'Delhi mein sab nahi chalta hai': After 21 deaths in Malviya Nagar fire, who is to blame?

NEW DELHI: Twenty-one people are dead. Thirteen of them were foreign nationals who had come to India seeking medical care, not a grave. And as the smoke clears over the charred shell of Flourish Stay B&B in Hauz Rani, a familiar Delhi drama is now playing out — one agency pointing fingers at another, each carefully drawing the boundary of its own responsibility just short of where the failures actually began.The tourism department says it only grants licences. The MCD says it handles building violations but is hamstrung by Lal Dora status. Delhi Police says its oversight was diluted after a 2025 MHA notification removed the requirement for police permission for hotels. The fire department says it never received a reference for a NOC because the building department never forwarded one. And the building department says the owner never submitted a complete plan.In the middle of this institutional maze stood a five-storey death trap — licensed for six rooms, running 26, without a fire NOC, without a sanctioned building plan, without smoke detectors, without automated fire alarms and sprinkler systems, without a second staircase, with a locked terrace and permanently sealed windows — and not a single authority flagged it before 21 people died.'The tourism department has no role in day-to-day functioning'Delhi tourism minister Kapil Mishra was among the first to react to the incident. Flourish Stay, he confirmed, was granted a B&B licence in 2024 under the Silver category for six rooms, valid until 2027. But his department, he said, was "largely limited to granting and renewing licences.""The owners are required to submit guest records to the local police station every 15 days. The tourism department does not have a role in the day-to-day functioning of these establishments," Mishra told news agency PTI.The minister has now announced the B&B policy will be scrapped entirely and all 432 registered properties across the city reviewed. The decision comes days after his own department released a draft revamp of the same policy on May 26, inviting public feedback.MCD surveyed it eight months agoSources within the Municipal Corporation of Delhi confirm that the Hauz Rani B&B was inspected by MCD officials approximately eight months before the fire.The team found a full-scale, sit-down restaurant operating from the ground floor — a clear violation of the tea-and-snacks licence the establishment held, which permitted no seating.MCD officials cite the building's location in a Lal Dora area and claim its construction over a decade ago provides protection under the Centre's Special Provisions Act.But an official within MCD's own building department contradicts this, pointing out that the immunity under that provision applies only to residential structures. This building was operating entirely as a commercial establishment — hotel rooms on every floor, a restaurant on the ground floor, a kitchen in the basement.“In this case, the building was being used for commercial purposes. It exceeded the permissible height of 9 metres and was operating without a fire NOC. Further, the MPD mandates a minimum opening of 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres on every floor, positioned 1.2 metres above the floor and facing the mandatory open space as well as the road side. These provisions were not complied with,” the official said.“In this case, the B&B was allegedly being misused as a hotel, with a restaurant operating on the ground floor,” a source said.Further undermining MCD's Lal Dora defence, urban policy expert Paras Tyagi, president of the Centre for Youth Culture Law and Environment, said that Lal Dora status provides no legal protection against municipal action. "As per notified building bye-laws of 2016, rules applicable in the city apply to Lal Dora as well," he told TOI. "MCD officials are concealing the information about the policy framework applicable to building construction."In a detail that raises deeper questions about institutional dysfunction, the building's owner Lavkesh Bajaj submitted a licence renewal application for the ground-floor restaurant at 9:35 am on June 3 — roughly an hour after the fire broke out and people were still being pulled from the smoke-filled building. The application was eventually rejected.Fire department: 'We never received a reference'Deputy chief fire officer AK Malik said the fire department never issued a NOC to Flourish Stay because it never received a reference from either the building authorities or the licensing agency.The owner had applied for a trade licence, but the complete building plan was never submitted, meaning the inter-agency chain that should have triggered a mandatory fire clearance never completed.The building, reportedly over 15 metres in height, legally required a fire safety NOC. It never had one.Malik also confirmed a structural reality that compounded the horror: The building was designed in a way that made escape nearly impossible. All windows were permanently sealed with toughened glass. There was a single entry and exit point with a sensor-operated main gate — which failed when power cut out. The terrace was locked. When fire erupted at the base of the only stairwell, every floor above became a sealed chamber."Buildings of this nature act like a shaft, where heat and smoke generated by a fire can engulf the entire structure within seconds," Malik said.Police oversight quietly reduced in 2025Senior police sources reveal that until recently, licences for hotels, guest houses and B&B establishments required police verification of both the property and the owner. Applicants with criminal records were ineligible. Crucially, the verification process ensured coordination across MCD, police and other agencies.Following a 2025 ministry of home affairs notification, police involvement in the approval process was significantly curtailed.It is also on record that Delhi Police's own licensing wing had turned down Bajaj's verification report in 2022-23.That finding appears to have had no downstream consequence for his continued operation of the establishment.Delhi HC warned them in January. They didn't act.The tragedy has a particularly bitter backdrop: Months before the fire, the Delhi high court had directed civic authorities to urgently address inadequate fire safety measures in hotels, restaurants and hospitality establishments across the capital.The January 7 order required an action plan to be submitted.The authorities never complied.Lawyer Arpit Bhargava, who filed the PIL, said that he had sent repeated reminders to the Delhi chief secretary, MCD commissioner and NDMC chairperson. None responded. He had filed the petition following the deaths of 25 people in a Goa nightclub blaze in December 2025.This is not the first such warning ignored.Delhi has lost 543 lives in fire accidents between 2019 and March 2026. Each tragedy — Anaj Mandi, Vivek Vihar, Arpit Palace Hotel — was followed by magisterial inquiries, stern statements and promises of accountability. A few junior officials were suspended.The systemic failures remained untouched.What is Lal Dora — and how did it become a loophole?The term 'Lal Dora' dates to a colonial-era revenue practice in which a red line was drawn on village maps to demarcate the inhabited boundary of a settlement, separating it from surrounding agricultural land.Properties within this boundary were historically exempt from standard building regulations, on the assumption that village settlements followed their own traditional norms.As Delhi grew, the city swallowed these villages whole. Hauz Rani, where the Flourish Stay B&B stood, is one of dozens of such urban villages — today surrounded by malls, hospitals and metro stations, but still carrying the Lal Dora tag their land was assigned generations ago.The legal and administrative confusion this creates is real and long-standing. When populations grew and families subdivided their land under the 'chakbandi' scheme, the names of successive generations were never entered into revenue records.Thousands of families in Delhi's urban villages today have no clear ownership title to their own homes. Banks will not lend against these properties. MCD does not collect property tax from them. And because the land was never properly mapped, it was never properly regulated.Ramesh Kumar (name changed), a resident of the urbanised village of Zamrudpur in south Delhi, discovered this contradictory reality firsthand in 2019 when he tried to add a floor to his 30-square-yard ancestral home inside the Lal Dora.MCD issued him a demolition notice almost immediately. His argument that building bye-laws did not apply in Lal Dora areas found no takers in court, and he has been fighting notices ever since.The same ambiguity that penalises ordinary residents like Kumar has been weaponised by commercial operators to shield illegal construction from scrutiny.The solution to this confusion has been available for years and repeatedly recommended. The PP Srivastava Committee flagged it in 2007. The Delhi high court endorsed it in 2010. Prime Minister Modi launched the SVAMITVA scheme in 2020 to map village land using drones and give residents formal ownership documents.In Delhi, drone surveys were completed in 32 of 49 rural villages by 2022 — then stalled. Ground verification has not been done. Letters and phone calls from scheme officials to the Delhi government have gone unanswered.Deepika Jha of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, who has studied Delhi's land administration system, notes that Lal Dora properties are likely the worst-mapped in the entire city. "It is difficult to prove ownership of these properties. Since these areas are exempted from property tax, even MCD doesn't have proper records," she said.That absence of records — of ownership, of layout plans, of sanctioned floors, of fire clearances — is precisely the darkness in which a building like Flourish Stay was able to grow from two-and-a-half storeys to five, from six rooms to twenty-five, from a tea stall licence to a full commercial hotel, entirely in plain sight.Which brings it back to the man who bought the building three years ago, expanded it, and allegedly ran it as a death trap.Delhi Police had already filed an FIR against Lovkesh Bajaj in 2024 for violating norms — including the absence of metal detectors and CCTV cameras at the establishment.When confronted about the illegal modifications he had made to the building, Bajaj told investigators the changes had been suggested by the previous owner and were common practice and that "Delhi mein sab chalta hai."Twenty-one people paid for that assurance with their lives.'The expert verdictParas Tyagi, who has been studying Delhi's village land governance for over a decade and has a petition pending in the high court since 2025, is unsparing in his assessment."The MCD is responsible for allowing misuse of the property, commercial use on all floors, absence of a sanctioned building plan after 2016, and most importantly the absence of a fire safety certificate," he told TOI. "What about the water and electricity connections? How were they provided if the whole building was operational as a hotel and restaurant?"On the Lal Dora ambiguity that officials routinely cite: "Today, technology and policy guidelines are crystal clear. No such ambiguity can get past the administration if they put in efforts to control and monitor such illegalities. It is a matter of grave concern that the Prime Minister's flagship policies like SVAMITVA and NAKSHA are not implemented in Delhi's villages. MCD and GNCTD officials are just sitting on policy implementation — blaming each other, even when lives are lost."Urban planning expert Jagdish Mamgain, former chairman of the works committee of the erstwhile unified MCD, said the question should not be limited to the number of rooms permitted."The more important question is how it continued to operate with a valid licence when commercial activities were allegedly being carried out from the basement, which is a violation of norms," he said.What happens nowThe Delhi government has constituted district-level committees to conduct city-wide inspections. A month-long crackdown has been ordered.MCD has sealed five B&B establishments in Hauz Rani and is seeking licence cancellations for 12 more. Demolition drives are underway across South Delhi. A magisterial inquiry has been ordered.This, too, is a script Delhi has seen before.After the Saket building collapse in late May killed six, a magisterial inquiry was ordered. Two junior engineers were suspended. No further accountability followed.After the Vivek Vihar fire in May killed nine, another probe was ordered. Over a month later, the status of accountability measures remains unclear.After the Palam fire in March killed nine, another inquiry was ordered.A senior Delhi government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, captured the pattern plainly: "Weak enforcement of building regulations, unauthorised commercial activities, inadequate fire safety systems and poor inspection mechanisms are recurring factors behind many disasters."The only question the Malviya Nagar fire poses — and that its 21 victims deserve an answer to — is not which department failed. They all did. The question is whether, this time, any of them will be held to account for it.(With inputs from agencies)