Cabinet Secretariat wants fire safety included in National Building Code, BIS panel recommends otherwise

NEW DELHI: A technical committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards has recommended the Cabinet Secretariat’s deregulation panel to reconsider its “recommendation” to remove fire and life safety from the main national building codes and move them to “manuals”, arguing that fire safety is a critical issue and improperly planned or maintained buildings can turn into death traps.The deregulation panel, aiming to ease the lives of individuals and businesses, has proposed amendments to the National Building Code (NBC) in which sections dealing with prerequisites for the application of code provisions, management and development control and promotion codes and general building requirements will be removed. The panel’s recommendations are based on stakeholder input.The group also recommended that fire and life safety, construction management, landscape development, sustainable asset and facilities management methods be included in separate “manuals” as a reference for best practice. The idea is to let state governments and municipalities decide the norms.This is the second time the panel has recommended changes to the BIS’s norms. The last item is the withdrawal of notification regarding revision of seismic codes.The BIS committee has accepted several recommendations from the deregulation panel, including dividing the city into fire zones, removing height restrictions and relaxing sprinkler system requirements for all low-hazard and small industries. “The committee has agreed to amend valuable provisions in the proposals. But any dilution of fire safety norms must be avoided in the interest of public safety,” said a panellist.When the draft NBC-2025 was ready for release, after more than two years of work by experts, the panel said in a letter to states that NBC would not mandate that they follow it, some committee members said. The letter dated June 25 last year stated that “NBC is not legally binding. This is a voluntary code for reference. It is not a “statute” in the legally binding sense…the subject of land and buildings is listed in List II (State List) of the Constitution.“Thus, matters such as building and FAR/FSI norms, setbacks, ground cover, parking, green area, fire regulation and other aspects covered by NBC fall under the exclusive legislative and administrative jurisdiction of the states,” it said.