It was a regular Monday afternoon when Lucknow turned into a tragedy no one saw coming — except, in hindsight, maybe everyone should have.
At around 3 PM on June 22, a fire broke out in a three-storey building on Usha Mehta Marg in the Aliganj area. The building had a coaching centre and animation institute on its upper floors. Students were inside attending classes. Within minutes, smoke swallowed the stairways, and the exits were gone.
By evening, 18 people were dead. Most were in their early twenties.
Another video shows the heartbreaking moments during the devastating fire as it unfolded at a coaching centre, which claimed 15 lives in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
https://t.co/KB01Kw1kmz pic.twitter.com/bhSIJ1W9TX
— Weather Monitor (@WeatherMonitors) June 22, 2026
How It Unfolded
The fire started from a shop on the ground floor and moved upward fast. People inside had nowhere to go. Some made it to windows and rooftops. A few jumped to the ground below, and locals on the street scrambled to spread mattresses to break their fall before rushing them to hospital.
Fourteen fire tenders were deployed. Rescue teams eventually drilled through a wall to pull out those trapped inside. For many, it was already too late. Suffocation, not burns, claimed most of the lives.
Years of Ignored Warnings
The building’s legal history is the kind of thing that makes you angry once you read it.
The plot was originally allotted in 1980. In 2013, it changed ownership. A year later, in 2014, the building map was approved for residential use only, under a self-certification scheme. That’s a home. Not a shop, not a classroom, not a gaming zone.
The Lucknow Development Authority issued a demolition order in 2016 after unauthorised construction was flagged. That order lasted less than two months before it was quietly revoked. No one has explained why.
For the next decade, this building sat in a residential neighbourhood operating as a commercial hub, with coaching classes running on upper floors and zero legal clearance for any of it.
What Happened After
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was in Aligarh when the news broke. He returned to Lucknow the same day and visited the injured at the hospital.
Four joint owners of the building were arrested that night. Ram Krishna Upadhyay, Virendra Prasad Shukla, Tushar Krishna Jaiswal, and Suresh Kumar Sahu are now facing charges under the BNS for culpable homicide and acts that endangered human life, along with UP fire service laws.
An FIR was also registered against six named individuals in total. Four government officials from the Lucknow Development Authority, the fire department, and the electricity department were suspended.
A Special Investigation Team was formed with senior IAS and IPS officers, given a seven-day deadline to file a report.
State compensation was set at Rs 5 lakh per victim’s family and Rs 50,000 for the injured. PM Modi announced an additional Rs 2 lakh from PMNRF for each family.
Anguished by the loss of lives in a fire mishap in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. My condolences to the bereaved families. May the injured recover at the earliest. Rescue operations are underway and authorities are providing all possible assistance.
An ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh from…— PMO India (@PMOIndia) June 22, 2026
The Part Nobody Wants to Sit With
Arrests are good. Suspensions are good. But here’s what still doesn’t have an answer: how does a building with a residential permit and a prior demolition notice run commercial operations for over a decade in a prime Lucknow neighbourhood without a single intervention?
This fire also happened just weeks after more than 20 people died in a similar blaze at a Delhi restaurant, same pattern, different city.
The SIT has seven days. Eighteen families are counting them.