Nearly 14 months after the state notified a new third-party audit regime for fire safety systems under its ease of doing business drive, official records accessed under the Right To Information (RTI) Act show that only nine agencies have been empanelled statewide, and the directorate of fire and emergency services (DFES) has no record of how many fire audits these agencies have carried out.The regime stems from a home department notification dated June 23, 2025, which, for the first time, laid down guidelines to regulate the installation, certification, and third-party auditing of fire protection and life safety systems in the state’s low-risk and high-risk buildings. Under the notification, the DFES director may licence qualified individuals or firms — engineers with prescribed fire-safety qualifications and experience — to act as ‘licensed agencies’ empowered to conduct fire audits and certify installations, removing the requirement that the department alone inspect every building.The notification also specifies eligibility criteria that every licensed agency must meet before empanelment: A degree or diploma in fire engineering (or equivalent professional membership, such as a fellowship of the Institution of Fire Engineers), or a prescribed number of years of relevant experience, along with specified financial solvency, technical track record, infrastructure, and a clean legal record.It promises a real-time, publicly accessible online dashboard showing the number of inspections conducted, the compliance status of audited buildings, and the performance history of each licensed agency. Section 9 empowers the director to suspend or cancel a licence for non-compliance, submission of false certificates, or negligence and malpractice, after due process.An RTI reply furnished by the DFES North Zone office on Aug 20 highlights gaps in implementation. When asked for the total number of vendors empanelled to conduct third-party fire audits, the department said the number was nine statewide. When asked how many fire audits these agencies have carried out, and for the names and addresses of the buildings audited, the department responded, “Information not available.” More than a year after the system was notified — and despite the dashboard promise — the DFES appears to have no consolidated record of third-party audits conducted under the regime.The department also declined to disclose the specific technical and professional qualifications held by the owners of the nine empanelled firms — despite the notification’s eligibility requirements — citing the third-party information exemption under Section 8(1)(d) read with Section 11 of the RTI Act.While the department furnished copies of notices convening its scrutiny committee roughly once a month between Nov 2025 and Aug 2026, these were meeting notices, not signed minutes recording what was discussed or decided, as sought in the RTI query.Sources familiar with the rollout said implementation has been rockier than the paperwork suggests. They said the option to select a third-party agency on the online NOC portal was non-functional for an extended period, forcing applicants back to fire offices for inspections despite the third-party system being in force. The glitch, they said, was fixed only in the past few days.
