The roof came down at about 5 a.m. on Friday, June 28, 2024. Heavy rain had been hammering Delhi for hours, and a section of canopy and its metal pillars outside the departure area of Terminal 1 at Indira Gandhi International Airport crashed onto the cars below.
One person died. Republic reported that he was a cab driver, Ramesh Kumar, pulled from a car an iron beam had landed on and declared dead at the nearby Medanta hospital. Atul Garg, director of Delhi Fire Services, said at least eight people were injured. Broadcast footage showed a taxi flattened under a pillar at the entrance.
Terminal 1 handles only domestic flights, run by IndiGo and SpiceJet. It was evacuated. Operations were suspended until 2 p.m., and IndiGo cancelled all departures from the terminal until midnight, moving arriving flights to Terminals 2 and 3. SpiceJet shifted its flights to Terminal 3.
The rain
The airport authority blamed “heavy rain”. India’s weather office recorded 148.5mm in three hours, more than the average for all of June. Over the 24 hours from 8:30 a.m. the day before, the city got 228mm, the most for a June day since 1936, when 235.5mm fell. A normal June brings 80.6mm.
The airport operator, DIAL, set up a technical committee to look into the collapse. “While the cause for the collapse is being assessed, the primary cause seems to be the continued heavy rainfall over the past few hours,” it said. Delhi Police registered a case against unknown persons under sections covering causing hurt by an act endangering life and causing death by negligence. Civil Aviation Minister K Ram Mohan Naidu said an inquiry had been ordered and experts would examine the terminal’s structure.
An old roof, a political fight
Naidu said the part that fell belonged to an older terminal, in operation since 2009. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had recently opened a refurbished Terminal 1, and a video Modi posted earlier this year put the upgrade at $553 million. The roof that collapsed was not part of that work.
The opposition was not inclined to draw the distinction. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wrote on X of “shoddy infrastructure (was) falling like a deck of cards, in the past 10 years of Modi Govt.” Priyanka Gandhi Vadra accused the prime minister of an “inauguration spree” before the recent elections and questioned his accountability for the “poor construction work and this corrupt model.”
Aviation analyst Ameya Joshi said quality should not be sacrificed for speed, and called for audits of existing structures, noting the roof was an older one. Arghya Sengupta of the Vidhi Center for Legal Policy wrote that every airport in the country should be inspected at once, with periodic reviews after that.
Earlier that week, part of a canopy at Jabalpur airport in Madhya Pradesh had also collapsed in heavy rain. That terminal cost $50 million and was inaugurated by Modi in March. Last year a Himalayan tunnel under construction fell in, trapping 41 workers for 17 days.
The rest of the city fared no better. Underpasses flooded, a metro station closed, and the Delhi Jal Board said a pump house fault would cut water supply into the next day. Power was shut off in several neighbourhoods as a precaution against electrocution.
Sources
- Delhi airport roof collapse highlights Modi’s infrastructure challenges
- Fatal Roof Cave-In at Delhi Airport Exposes Infrastructure Flaws Amid Torrential Downpour
- Airport Roof Collapse to Waterlogging: 24 Hours of Downpour Exposes Delhi's Infra
