The AP State Disaster Response and Fire department is planning to make fire safety license mandatory for the non-high rise building (structures between 10 and 15 metres height). In order to get the license, the property owners of non-rise buildings should provide the information of fire-fighting equipment on their premises and should pay a license fee to the department.
Till now this regulation was only applicable to high rise building above 15 metres in height. But after looking at the recent fire accidents, the authorities came to know that most of the low-rise buildings are also prone to fire accidents and these accidents are becoming perilous as the property owners are not taking any fire safety precautions. Thus, they decided to pay attention to these structures. According to the official records the authorities are expecting around 50,000 buildings to obtain licenses once the new norms are enforced.
Non-high rise building fall into four categories.
- The first category buildings should pay Rs 500 towards license fee, which include non-AC cinema halls, restaurants and hotels with seating capacity of between 30 and 100 seats, exhibition halls, and venues of industrial, entertainment and political meetings.
- The second category of buildings should pay Rs 1000, which include clubs, residential schools, colleges with 100 to 1,000 inmates, lodgings of 50 rooms and above, software firms with more than 20 computers, laboratories and research institutes.
- All the third category buildings like stadia, cold storages, film studios, firecracker manufacturing units, major automobile showrooms, residential schools, garments and textile manufacturing units should pay Rs 2,500.
- And finally the fourth category which includes multi-specialty hospitals, star hotels, distilleries and breweries, power generation units, petroleum refineries, multiplexes, large and medium scale industries should pay Rs 5000 towards license fee.
Under the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), fire prevention wings would collect the license fee. Before issuing the licenses there will be an official inspection by the officers and the issued licenses would be valid for three years.
A gazetted notification for collecting the license fee from owners of non-high rise buildings will be issued by the government in few more days, said the sources.
Source: TOI