Growing Pains

A pair of truly horrific building related calamities in the world's two most populous countries this week. First, a high rise fire killed 53 people in Shanghai, a city of 20 million that has seen an explosion of construction in recent years, and unsound building practices seem to be the culprit:

Chinese police are holding four suspects after a Shanghai apartment fire that killed 53 people and injured 70 others was blamed on unlicensed welding, state media said.

The fire, which gutted a 28-storey building in China's commercial hub, was sparked by "unlicensed welding carried out contrary to rules," Xinhua, the official news agency, reported without citing a source.

The report did not say whether those detained were workers or managers. 

The swift arrests come as authorities tackle public concern over why the fire took more than four and a half hours to extinguish.

A second and even more deadly disaster transpired in New Delhi, when a tenement housing mostly migrant workers from India's eastern countryside collapsed, killing 64 people. Apparently, it might as well have been built on a swamp:

The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, but suspicions immediately centered on this year’s heavy monsoon rains, the building’s location near a swollen river and shoddy, illicit construction.

“There is already a question mark on the legality of the construction of buildings in this area,” said Tajendra Khanna, the city’s lieutenant governor, and the owner of the building, Amrit Singh, was being sought for arrest.

 New Delhi has upwards of 15 million people, and some say it is poised to overtake Mumbai in the that arena if current rates persist. China's and India's big cities are swelling so rapidly they seem tragically overwhelmed and at a loss to keep up; these twin disasters are certainly symptoms of that.

Top: A high rise burns in Shanghai (AP) Bottom: Rescuers search for survivors in New Delhi (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)