The failure of fire safety norms

The Secunderabad accident has brought back focus on illegal building structures

The horrific fire accident on September 12 in Secunderabad, Telangana, in which eight guests of a hotel were asphyxiated, was just one among several occasions when debate on illegal structures gets stoked, only to die away eventually in the humdrum of urban life.

Leaders, right from the mayor of the city up to the Prime Minister of the country, expressed sorrow over the mishap. For the common public, the accident and the whole line-up of regret to ex-gratia, was just a deja vu from six months ago, when 12 persons, all of them daily wage labourers from Bihar, died in a fire accident at Bhoiguda, another part of Secunderabad.

Also read | Four arrested in Secunderabad hotel fire case 

In the recent incident, fire erupted in the basement of the structure, and the plumes of smoke enveloped the hotel in the upper floors, choking the guests. The basement was unauthorised, as also the top floor of the building, both of which represented gross deviations from the plan sanctioned by the civic body.

A report by the Regional Fire Officer pointed out several irregularities, including absence of set-back spaces and escape routes, defunct fire-fighting equipment, spiral staircase around the elevator shaft, basement utilised illegally for commercial purposes, and absence of smoke management and emergency lighting. The building has been thriving for the past 8-9 years, under the protection offered by the Building Regularisation Scheme (BRS), 2015.

Since 1998, the era of the joint State of Andhra Pradesh, the BRS has become a hope for deviant builders to circumvent the norms, and a pretext for successive governments to make money under the justification of ‘fait accompli’. The standard defence had been that the builder would go scot-free in case of any action, while the innocent occupants of the building would have to suffer for no fault of theirs.

This went on till 2016, when the BRS announced by the Telangana State government the previous year was challenged in the High Court. The process then came to an abrupt halt, not before 1.13 lakh property owners submitted their applications seeking regularisation. The owner of the ill-fated building at Secunderabad where the fire occurred, was one of the applicants to the scheme. Though the process has been since stalled, the authorities have not taken any action against the deviations, except charging the owners double the normal amount of property tax and power bills.