One Fire In Capital, Three Lessons For India

Last week, 21 people died when a fire tore through a five-storey bed-and-breakfast in Hauz Rani, Malviya Nagar, Delhi. Thirteen were foreign nationals. Reports say the building had no fire NOC, a single entry and exit, sealed windows, a locked terrace, and a basement kitchen from which smoke and flames moved up the central staircase.

This was a specific failure. It was not an unusual one. In Dec 2025, a nightclub fire killed 25 in Goa. In April 2025, a firecracker warehouse blast killed 21 in Gujarat. In 2022, 27 died in a commercial building fire in Mundka. The locations change; the script does not.

Arrests, FIRs, and sealing drives will follow. They should. Criminal negligence must be punished. But govts that stop there will repeat a familiar cycle: outrage, mass inspections, sealings, court stays, overburdened officials, and then business as usual until the next fire.

Ad hoc drives do not merely fail – they drain the administrative and judicial capacity that a real safety system needs. Every sealed building that reopens on a court stay signals to thousands of others that the system does not mean what it says. Accountability and reform must run together.

First, Indian cities must make safe, legal density possible. After a fire in an illegal building, the instinct is to blame permissiveness. The better question is why illegal construction is so universal.

Floor Area Ratio – the permitted ratio of built-up area to plot area – sits at 1.5 to 2 in most of Delhi. Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Lucknow are no different. Singapore’s dense zones reach 25; Los Angeles goes to 13; even Mumbai’s commercial areas can go to 5. Pile on ground coverage limits, height caps, setbacks and parking mandates, and legitimate small hotels, PGs, and clinics become financially unviable.

Demand does not disappear. It moves into converted homes, extra floors, and basements. Around 40L Delhi residents live in unauthorised colonies. The story is not different in Surat, Indore or Patna. Informality is not an exception to India’s planning system; it is one of its largest products.

The answer is legal categories for uses that already exist everywhere – budget guesthouses, PGs, neighbourhood commerce – with more buildable space exchanged for non-negotiable life-safety conditions: protected staircases, safe kitchens, clear exits, working alarms.

Second, fire safety must be built in, not bolted on through a separate no-objection certificate (NOC). A guesthouse in a narrow lane cannot meet the same checklist as a grade-A tower. When compliance feels impossible, the NOC becomes a transaction. Once paid, the incentive to meet even the basics collapses. Malviya Nagar was not a building with inadequate fire safety; it was a building with none, because the operator had already bought his way out of the system.

The structural answer is to abolish the fire NOC as a standalone instrument. Issuing it as a separate approval after building plan sanction, creates a second corruption queue, divorces fire safety design from architectural design at the cheapest moment to integrate them, and gives fire departments a clerical workload that crowds out firefighting.

Fire safety compliance should instead be embedded in building plan approval: architects and licensed fire safety engineers certify that designs meet proportionate, risk-calibrated standards – different for a five-storey hostel and a high-rise commercial block. The fire department’s role becomes standard-setting, third-party empanelment and enforcement, not paperwork.

Third, fire departments need private sector help. No state fire department – Delhi’s, Mumbai’s, Bengaluru’s – has the staff to inspect its full building stock on any meaningful cycle. The answer is empanelled private fire safety auditors: authorised to inspect, certify, and upload reports, with the fire department auditing a sample and punishing fraud with blacklisting and criminal liability. Delhi’s amended Fire Service Rules, notified on May 26, do exactly this. Other states should follow without waiting for their own tragedy. A national framework under the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), building on the 2016 National Building Code, should set minimum standards for auditors, and push states to integrate third-party certification into building approval workflows.

After every fire, the easiest demand is for toughness: seal more buildings, arrest more owners, order more surveys. Some of that is warranted. But toughness without reform only raises the price of illegality, and consumes the scarce official capacity that continuous, system-level safety would actually require. The harder task is to make legality possible, compliance affordable, and inspection continuous.

The Malviya Nagar fire is not an aberration. It was India’s urban bargain catching fire: everyone knows the rules are unworkable, everyone knows they are being violated, and everyone hopes nothing terrible happens. That bargain plays out in Goa nightclubs, Gujarat warehouses, Mumbai basements, and Delhi guesthouses alike.

It must end. Build more legally, regulate more realistically, free fire departments from clerical NOC queues, and inspect more widely. That will matter more than another ritual crackdown.

The writer is Operating Partner, The Convergence Foundation