1. The macro picture
India ranks second globally for elevator-related accidents, and the trend is worsening. Mumbai alone has reported approximately eight elevator fatalities annually, with several years showing a rising curve. In Telangana, news investigations have estimated that 70 to 80 per cent of installed lifts are unsafe — locally assembled, untested, and without third-party certification.
Reported root causes are consistent across Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi-NCR: cheap components, absent or token maintenance contracts, no third-party inspection, and a regulatory framework that licenses installation but rarely audits operation.
Power-outage behaviour is one specific failure mode within this larger picture. A standard ARD that takes thirty seconds or longer to activate creates a dark, silent, motionless cabin in those thirty seconds — and a slow rescue if anything else has gone wrong with the lift simultaneously. An ERD-class system removes that failure mode entirely.
2. The incident ledger
6 incidents currently logged. Aggregate from this dataset alone: 6 fatalities and 6 injured. This is a floor, not a ceiling — every number is something we could source from published news. Most lift incidents in India are never reported nationally.
| Date | Location | Summary | Casualties |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-03 | Siricilla, Telangana | Former Chief Security Officer of the Telangana Secretariat died of chest injuries sustained when an apartment-complex elevator collapsed mid-descent. | 1† |
| 2024-11-10 | Tambaram, Tamil Nadu | Security guard fell down an elevator shaft from the fourth floor of an apartment building after a shaft door was found open while the lift was not on the floor. | 1† |
| 2024-11 | Chandulal Baradari, Hyderabad | Six people injured when a lift plummeted from the sixth floor of an apartment building. | 6 inj. |
| 2024-08 | Gudimalkapur, Hyderabad | 65-year-old man fell to his death in an elevator shaft. | 1† |
| 2023-08 | Noida, Uttar Pradesh | Multiple people injured in a residential apartment lift incident that drew national attention to UP lift safety enforcement. | — |
| 2023-01 | Mumbai, Maharashtra | Three persons died in elevator mishaps in the first month of 2023, following a year (2022) in which four persons died in similar incidents. | 3† |
† = fatalities. Casualty figures reflect what was published in the cited source at the time; later revisions are not always tracked back. Where a source updates its figures, we update this table.
3. Patterns we see
- Residential apartments dominate. The majority of incidents we have logged occurred in residential high-rises rather than commercial offices, hospitals, or hotels — venues where lift maintenance budgets are typically larger and inspection more frequent.
- Open-shaft falls recur. Multiple incidents involve a person stepping into an open shaft when the lift was on a different floor. This points to door-interlock failure, not power-system failure — but it sits in the same regulatory enforcement gap.
- Maintenance, not just installation. Of the cases we have sourced, post-incident investigations consistently flag absent or inadequate AMCs as a contributing factor. Statutory installation standards do not, on their own, prevent age-related failure.
4. The dataset that does not exist
There is no public, central, comparable-across-states dataset of lift fatalities and serious injuries in India. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not publish elevator incidents as a separate category. State Chief Electrical Inspectors hold incident data but do not routinely publish it.
We are filing Right to Information (RTI) requests with state Chief Electrical Inspectors to begin building this dataset. As responses arrive, they will be published here with the request, the response, and the reconciled numbers.
Until that dataset exists, claims about whether one state has fewer lift accidents than another — including any claim that connects an accident rate to a specific regulatory choice — cannot be verified and we will not make them.
5. Submit an incident
If you know of a lift fatality or serious injury that should be added to this ledger, send us:
- The date, city, and building (anonymised if needed).
- A link to a published news report or court order. We do not log unverified incidents.
- Any first-hand context (resident, RWA office-bearer, OEM technician, municipal officer) that helps reconstruct what happened.
Email tips@liftinverter.com. We source-protect contributors who request it.