Playing With Fire

• Many firms and godowns don't have NOCs from Fire Department

• Promoters-officials-insurance collusion thrives

Managements of ‘errant’ firms are using loopholes in the Fire Services Act to suit their vested interests; despite notices for lack of NOCs, ‘guilty’ promoters seem oblivious; workers perishing in fires brings no change-of-heart

Hoodwink the authorities by shelling down a paltry thousand rupees or so and get away with murder. This seems to be the avowed governing dictum of the men with ‘scruples’ running hundreds of firms or having godowns in the twin cities.

Many of them are more than willing to pay up fines for not having the mandated security cover than pay lakhs of rupees to obtain No Objection Certificates (NOC).

Apparently, they seem bolstered by the fact that insurance firms would pay their claims, if their factory or godown gets gutted in a fire that could have been avoided in the first place!

If one has to abide by the governing rules as laid down by the Department of Fire Services (DFS), whereupon one has to compulsively have an NOC, the management has to off-load lakhs to obtain and install the required equipment. If one cares a damn and continues ‘operations’ sans the NOC, he can be slapped with a notice and subsequently a fine that is in the Rs 20,000 range, at worse. If you are worried about claiming insurance money then here’s the catch. Insurance companies do not have a clause that the firm or godown should possess an NOC! So the amount would be paid to the ‘defaulter’, anyway.

This raises the question whether the Fire Services Act of 1999 is there just for the heck of it. It makes one wonder if the DFS is doing worthwhile to check such ‘malpractices’ at all? As and when the DFS,armed with the Act and Rule Book, approaches the court the errant firm is fined between Rs 10,000 to 20,000 despite the gravity of the offence.

The amount being peanuts, quite literally, managements are too happy to pay it up and carry on with their businesses, all over in a day’s work!

Going by the statistics available with the DFS, there are presently 900 firms in the city that have been identified as accident prone. There firms include Pharma and chemical companies among others. From 2008, on an average, 900 accidents (minor and major) have been reported under the Greater Hyderabad limits. More gruesome is the fact that as many as 75 people perished in fire accidents in the past six years.

Experts, while lamenting the shortfall in fire stations, blame that though the Act was constituted in 1999, it was being implemented forcefully and authoritatively only since 2011. Here is another catch-As against the mandatory 16 staffers at any given time, most of the existing ones in the State capital, function with 10 personnel. A senior official with the Department of Fire Services said that it was exactly a year ago that they had appealed to the Centre, asking for an amendment to the existing Act, seeking three to six months of jail time for NOC offenders. However, that petition has made no major headway and it remains in cold storage for whatever reasons.

Here is the vicious circle in a nutshell-an overly greedy management that is least concerned about human lives; ‘unscrupulous’ officials who are too happy when the palms are greased by ‘magnanimous’ promoters and an ‘overly friendly’ neighbourhood insurance company that is equally delighted at coming to the rescue of a policy holder whose ‘produce/stock’ has been ‘unfortunately’ gutted. After all, life insurance is nowhere in the picture.

The official is perhaps right when he says, “The onus now lies with the insurance companies. They are paying claims without even checking whether the concerned firm has a proper NOC.

If they start asking for the NOC and make it mandatory, then the offenders will fall in line.”

From 2008, on an average, 900 accidents (minor and major) have been reported under the Greater Hyderabad limits. More gruesome is the fact that as many as 75 people perished in fire accidents in the past six years