Eight persons from two families were killed when an old, two-storey building collapsed yesterday in Maharashtra’s Thane district, an official said.
The building, located at Hanuman Tekdi area of Bhiwandi town suddenly crashed around 7am, catching the handful of occupants unawares, said Sub Inspector Jairam Patil of Bhiwandi Control Room.
The local fire brigade and disaster management teams from Thane and Kalyan rushed to the crash site and managed to rescue four persons from the debris earlier this morning.
A search is still on for another two or three persons still believed to buried under the rubble, Patil said, even as rescue operations were hampered by intermittent rains.
Among the deceased are the landlord and owner of the building, Sajjanlal Mahadev Gupta, 60 and his wife Sitodevi Sajjanlal Gupta, 55.
Six members — three adults and three children — of the Thakur family living there have been wiped out in the disaster, according to Patil.
The 35-year-old building was declared as “dangerous” some months ago and an evacuation notice served on residents, but many them ignored it, said local legislator Kapil Patil.
While water supply was cut sometime ago, the civic authorities were planning to disconnect the power to the building soon.
Top police and civic officials are supervising the rescue and relief works since the morning.
The entire coastal Konkan region including Thane has been battered by heavy rains in the past few days.  
This is second building crash in a week in the powerloom town of Bhiwandi, which is around 35km north of Mumbai. 
Last Sunday, a building crash in the town’s Gaibinagar had claimed nine lives and another 10 were injured.