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“A widow is a person who loses her spouse; an orphan loses his parent, but there is no word in English for the one who loses his child, because afterwards there is not much left to lose,” said the protagonist of the movie in his deep midnight radio jockey voice while adjusting black spectacles on his nose. His face felt dead, expressionless, and his eyes blank. I pressed the stop button on my phone and thought if we could halt a painful scene in real life. My mind could draw immediate analogies between this scene and the pain through which the parents of the kids buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed building in Lahore must have passed. With those kids, their parents would have buried a lot more: dreams, hopes, futures, laughs, generations and life.
On August 26, 2025 I wrote an Op-ed with the same title. To emphasise the gravity of the matter, I am publishing under the same title today.
Buildings speak – not with words, but through the cracks that snake across their walls, ceilings, slabs and beams. They speak through peeling plaster, blistered paint, rusted pipelines and termite-eaten wooden doors that groan with age. Every creak in an old building is a warning; every ignored warning is a ticking clock.
Same happened in Lahore. On Tuesday afternoon, tragedy struck Lahore’s Kahna area when the roof of a private tuition centre operating inside a residential building collapsed during class, killing at least 14 children and injuring nine others, including a teacher. More than 30 students, aged between five and 16 years, were believed to be inside when the TR-girder-supported roof gave way, burying children beneath tonnes of rubble.
The incident once again exposed the persistent failure to enforce building safety standards in Pakistan, where preventable structural collapses continue to claim innocent lives.
In July, a five-storey building already deemed unsafe, collapsed in a cloud of dust, killing 27 people and leaving nearly 50 families displaced in Karachi. The rescue operation later revealed the grim reality: no enforcement, no relocation – just bureaucratic apathy. Government bodies had issued evacuation notices since 2023, the latest in June 2025 – yet residents continued living in deadly proximity.
Days earlier, another structure collapsed in Karachi, killing at least six people, highlighting that these tragedies are far from isolated. In February 2024, a decrepit structure in Lahore’s Hanjarwal area crashed down during renovation. Rescue teams arrived swiftly, but the tragedy had already unfolded beneath crumbling bricks and brittle ceilings. A 65-year-old block in a hospital collapsed while being renovated. A factory collapse killed 45 workers and left over 100 injured – yet the lesson remains unheeded.
Across Pakistan, thousands of unengineered and structurally vulnerable buildings stand as silent disasters waiting to unfold. Some are occupied by families, others rented to tenants yet all remain potential death traps. The real obstacle is not a lack of technical solutions but a lack of political will. Building safety must become a governance priority, with the performance of relevant departments measured not merely by administrative targets but by their success in preventing avoidable tragedies. Yet enforcement alone is not enough.
Many families continue living in unsafe buildings because they simply have nowhere else to go. No citizen should ever have to choose between homelessness and the risk of being buried beneath collapsing concrete. At the same time, the government must urgently expand the supply of affordable housing by introducing inclusionary zoning policies unlocking underutilised public land for affordable housing schemes, and promoting accessible financing through micro-mortgages, subsidised interest rates and rent-to-own programmes.
Encouraging the local production of cost-effective, climate-resilient construction materials, alongside streamlining regulatory approvals, can further reduce construction costs and make safe, dignified housing attainable for millions of Pakistanis.
