Fire safety takes a back seat as many buildings lack open area

Hyderabad: Less than 100 establishments in the city apply for no objection certificates (NOC) with the fire department every year in general, indicating that several of them run without fire safety norms.Lack of open space in and around these establishments is why many of them shy away from applying for NOCs, said officials. Following the Bhoiguda fire accident,

Sanjay Kumar Jain

, director general of fire department directed all the fire officials to conduct drives to upraise establishments about fire safety. While guidelines state that residential buildings not more than five floors and commercial buildings not more than three floors do not require NOC, even those who need it fail to apply for the same due to lack of open space.“In many cramped areas such as

Old City

, many establishments fail to meet the criteria. Majority of the applications come from

Shaikpet

, Banjara Hills,

Jubilee Hills

and those on the outskirts where there is sufficient open space,” said

Srinivas Reddy

, district fire officer. “We conduct surprise inspections every Friday and penalise the violators. However, due to the pandemic, all these cases were on hold for the last two years and we have resumed these services only recently,” said Reddy.
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