Hyderabad: As is evident from the Khairatabad fire incident, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation has been turning a blind eye to fire safety requirements for private and commercial properties and also to its own zonal and circle offices.
The GHMC through its fire wing has to accord a fire no-objection certificate (NOC) to all buildings up to five floors or 18 metres high. Leave aside the fact that it rarely checks fire safety compliance of schools, public halls or hospitals, it cares less about buildings where its own staff are employed too.
The GHMC’s headquarters has fire safety equipment such as smoke alarms, sprinklers, and fire extinguishers, but no one knows whether any of this will function during an emergency since the fire safety wing does not check them regularly.
Sources also said that while the town planning department accords permission to hundreds of multi-storey buildings every year, it has accorded the fire NOC to a mere 110 establishments, including schools, public halls, educational institutions, hospitals and restaurants.
GHMC officials claim that in 2016, the civic body issued notices to 3,869 buildings to procure fire extinguishers, and issued final notices to owners of 2,448 buildings following the blaze at Seetharambagh that brought down a five-storey building. Officials claim that as per GO 168, the civic body can only issue notices, but cannot take action.
A senior GHMC official said that there are fire extinguishers in all circle and zonal offices, but he wasn’t sure whether they are functioning. He said the civic body had issued fire NOCs to two cinema halls, 22 colleges, and three public halls under GO 168, and to 83 schools that complied with the national building code, which requires a school to have six metres of open space around it.
GHMC’s fire wing has no chief
The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s (GHMC) fire safety wing has been in a state of paralysis for the past two years, with no chief fire safety officer and only four safety officers instead of the eight.
The corporation must have an additional director (fire services), two district fire officers (DFOs) and five station officers, one for each zone.
The key post of additional director has been lying vacant for more than a year and the station officers’ posts since two years.
An officer of the corporation said that the lack of staff has been brought to the attention of the Telangana state disaster response and fire services department, but there has been no move to fill the vacancies.
