India's Fire Safety Crisis: An Analysis of the Fire Safety Infrastructure

Lives overturned. Dreams broken. Loved ones lost. 

This is the story behind the thousands of fire incidents that happen in India. These incidents often make it to headlines but only stay relevant until the next place fumes up. Till then, the conundrum of fire safety infrastructure rests in cold boxes, and when it wakes up, it is already too late. For a country that lost over 7,435 people in 2022 alone due to fire accidents, this should not be dismissed as negligence.

Illustration by The Geostrata

ALL FIRE THAT ENGULFS ALL

The anatomy of this disaster remains the same, from overcrowded premises and blocked exits to missing clearances. Moreover, these incidents have not been endemic to only one kind of public space but rather have stayed all-encompassing, be it coaching centres, hospitals, factories, entertainment venues, or residential buildings. Recently, 23 students died due to a fire in a coaching centre.

In a South Delhi hospital, seven newborn babies lost their lives in an outbreak. A warehouse caught fire in mid-July 2026 in Gurugram. All this, when the memory of 21 foreign nationals becoming the victims of one such tragedy in a hotel hadn't even eroded from our minds.

All these incidents reflect a pattern that stops looking like a series of isolated accidents and starts looking like a system.

 ENTIRETY OF LAWS

Fire services in India fall constitutionally within the State List and the Twelfth Schedule, making fire prevention and suppression the statutory responsibility of state governments and urban local bodies (ULBs).

The National Building Code, NBC 2016, functions as a model code laying out detailed provisions on fire prevention and firefighting infrastructure.

But here is the catch: it is recommendatory rather than self-executing, and its provisions acquire legal force only when a state or municipality incorporates them into local building bye-laws.

This produces wide inter-state variance, which means that a fire safety standard binding in Delhi may have no statutory equivalent in a smaller municipal corporation. States, however, have supplementary legislation such as the Delhi Fire Prevention and Fire Safety Rules, 1987, and Maharashtra's Fire Safety Act of 2006, which require a fire compliance certificate before construction beyond a certain height.

The National Disaster Management Authority, established under the Disaster Management Act of 2005, has issued guidelines on evacuation drills and structural fire resistance, and the Factories Act, 1948, and Bureau of Indian Standards codes add sector-specific obligations. The distance between NBC and state laws makes a unified framework difficult to achieve.

 REASONS OF FATALITY

In simple words, it is codification and compliance that lie at the root cause of the problem. Mainly, it can be attributed to the pattern of illegal construction, bureaucratic corruption, and a normalised civic apathy that allows fire-prone establishments like coaching centres and gaming zones to keep operating, despite visible safety deficiencies. Safety standards get scrutinised only after a mishap, followed by condemnation and inquiry committees.

The matter quickly reverts to business as usual, with accountability never quite fixed. The officers who are discharged from the duty of ensuring compliance often become the ones creating the burden.

Reports suggest that municipal commissioners across the states sit at the cusp of this failure.

This is a regulation-and-enforcement failure, where legal provisions exist but the mechanism to inspect, fine, and shut down non-compliant structures is chronically under-resourced.

In residential buildings, the manifestation of deliberate infrastructural lag. A small example can be the fire hose that is placed near the elevators of high-rise residential buildings. One thing is that very few residents know how to use it, and the other more important issue is that it is not connected to a water reservoir in most cases.

Ideally, a fire tanker should be installed inside the building to fetch water that may come out of the hose exit, but that rarely happens in most of the societies. 

Beyond this, rapid, often unplanned urbanisation has produced buildings retrofitted with extra floors and converted commercial uses that were never accounted for in the original fire safety assessment.

Retrofitting older buildings to modern fire standards remains expensive relative to municipal budgets and therefore, in some cities, like Bangalore, the NBC provisions remain effective for only the newly constructed ones.

Besides, civic awareness remains thin. Evacuation drills occur rarely outside high-end commercial complexes, and occupants of hotels and residential buildings are frequently unaware of exit routes or how to respond to a fire alarm until an actual emergency forces the question.

WHAT'S NEXT TO BE DONE?

Fire escape routes must stay clear of combustible materials, with non-combustible false ceilings and ventilation that keeps smoke from entering. Compartmentation in building design contains fires within smaller sections. This buys occupants more time to evacuate. Sprinkler systems remain one of the most effective safety measures, but only when properly designed and installed. 

Safety systems lose their value when building occupancy changes or new risks are added without updating them. High-density urban areas often lack adequate access for fire vehicles. Narrow streets, street parking, and encroachments block the way.

Renovations should prioritise fire-retardant wall panelling. Materials like curtains need a careful combustibility check, too. Many urban buildings in India still lack fire-resistant design, proper emergency exits, and basic evacuation planning. This makes escape difficult when a fire actually breaks out, a common complaint that recent Delhi incidents tell us.

On the administrative front, making fire NOC issuance and renewal a digitised, time-bound, and publicly trackable process would close the most obvious enforcement loophole. Building municipal fire department capacity through trained volunteer auxiliaries would shorten response times in the congested neighbourhoods where professional fire services alone cannot arrive fast enough. 

The Panacea is to make compliance mandatory and non-evasive. None of these requires rewriting India's fire code; they require making the existing one impossible to quietly ignore.

---

BY RIYA PANDEY

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com