Wall collapse in southern India kills 11: Officials

NEW DELHI: A wall collapsed Sunday in southern India killing 11 people including a child, just a week after a building crumbled in the same state claiming 61 lives, officials said.

The compound wall collapsed onto the huts of labourers following heavy monsoon rains in Tiruvallur district of Tamil Nadu state, a local government official said.

Four women and a child were among those killed, Tiruvallur district collector K Veera Raghava Rao told the Press Trust of India news agency.

The labourers, from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state, had been working on a warehouse, Rao told the agency. The country's millions of labourers and their families often live at the construction site or nearby.

"The eleven bodies of the victims are being sent to the district hospital and we are making arrangements for the post-mortem now," Chandrasekaran, a senior district police official, told AFP by phone.

He could neither confirm whether there were more trapped or how many had been rescued.

SP Selvan, a senior officer from the National Disaster Response Force, said heavy monsoon rains in the city may have damaged the wall.

"It is the rain, it is weakening structures. There have been 2 to 3 more reports like this but without any casualties thankfully," Selvan told AFP by phone.

The wall collapse is the latest in a series of deadly building accidents in India. The collapse of an 11 storey residential block last weekend on the outskirts of state capital Chennai, some 45 kilometres from the latest accident, killed 61 people.

The building collapse came only hours after a dilapidated apartment block crumbled in New Delhi, killing 10 people including five children.

Building collapses are common in India, highlighting the country's pervasive poor construction standards.

A massive demand for housing and endemic corruption often result in buildings being illegally constructed, along with use of shoddy materials and a lack of safety inspections.