India's Urban Crisis: Building Collapses Expose Enforcement Gap in Rapidly Growing Cities

In Delhi last week, a five-storey building fell and took seven lives — lives that rules already on the books were meant to protect. India's urban crisis is not a crisis of imagination or legislation, but of will: the country has written the codes, drawn the amendments, and mapped the standards, yet the machinery to enforce them remains largely inert. As India's cities prepare to absorb hundreds of millions more people by mid-century, the distance between the law and its application has become, itself, a cause of death.