Delhi schools to be made quake-proof

NEW DELHI: Rs1.2 crore is what the Central government would spend to provide earthquake-resistant shelters to the citizens of Delhi.

Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC), a subsidiary of the Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation, has agreed to strengthen and retrofit (making a building earthquake resistant) one municipal school each in the 12 zones of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). The approximate cost of retrofitting each school comes to about Rs10 lakh.

Delhi, which lies in seismic zone IV on the seismic vulnerability atlas of the country, is prone to high intensity earthquakes.

On Monday morning, a “mild intensity” earthquake hit the capital. With its epicentre at Bahadurgarh on the Delhi-Haryana border, the quake measuring 4.43 on the Richter scale was enough to shake people out of their beds on a cold winter morning.

A senior official of MCD’s engineering department said the decision to retrofit municipal schools was taken sometime back. The BMTPC had asked the MCD to submit a list of schools that could be retrofitted. A model earthquake resistant school has already been prepared by the BMTPC in Vasant Vihar in South West Delhi.

“Retrofitting of five other schools in different parts of the city is in progress. We had initially planned to retrofit at least five schools in each of the 12 MCD zones but since the expertise and material for retrofitting is limited, we decided to do one school per zone first,” the official said.

On an average, each MCD school is made over an area of 2,000 to 3,000 sq ft. “Retrofitting these schools would ensure that there are earthquake-resistant shelters across the city. These schools are big enough to accommodate a large number of people in the event of a calamity,” said a senior MCD engineer.

The MCD is also toying with the idea of setting up an earthquake resistant buildings cell with a separate staff headed by a chief engineer.

“The BMTPC is going to construct only some of our schools, later we will do it on our own. BMTPC with IIT Delhi and IIT Roorkee would provide us the technical know-how for retrofitting. This cell would then disseminate this know-how at different levels,” the official said.

On whether retrofitting of schools would hamper regular academic work in schools, the official said, “Retrofitting of schools would take between three and six months, depending on the school’s existing condition.

We would try to do this work during school vacations. However, since most MCD schools built over the last decade are in a good shape structurally, we would only need to retrofit their terraces and the main walls. This should not hamper the regular course of the schools.”