Fire safety compliance in India: what the law actually asks of you

Why the records matter more than the equipment

Inquiries after serious fires in India rarely find that equipment was absent. They find equipment that existed but had not been checked, a register that was signed but never verified, an escape route obstructed for months, and a finding raised in an earlier audit that was never closed.

That distinction matters because it changes what compliance work actually is. Buying extinguishers is a procurement exercise done once. Compliance is a records exercise repeated every month, forever, by somebody standing in front of each device writing down what they saw.

IS 2190: the extinguisher cycle

IS 2190 is the Indian Standard code of practice for the selection, installation and maintenance of first-aid fire extinguishers. It is the document most in-house fire routines are built on, and it sets a tiered regime rather than a single annual service.

Two things trip organisations up here. The first is that a partial discharge still requires a refill — an extinguisher used briefly and put back on its bracket is no longer a compliant device. The second is that the annual inspection cannot be done in-house; it needs a certified technician, and the certificate that results is part of your record.

The half-yearly certificate

Most Indian states operate a statutory certification cycle for covered buildings. In Maharashtra it runs under the Maharashtra Fire Prevention and Life Safety Measures Act, 2006: the owner or occupier must have the building's fire-fighting installations inspected by a licensed fire safety agency and furnish the prescribed certificate to the Chief Fire Officer twice a year, in January and July.

• Only a licensed agency authorised under the Act can inspect and certify.
• The filing is the owner's or occupier's duty — not the agency's, and not the equipment supplier's.
• Non-compliance attracts notices and penalties from the fire authority.
• Other states run their own equivalents; check the act that applies to your location.

NBC 2016 Part 4: the annual audit

A fire safety audit is a systematic examination of a building against Part 4 — Fire and Life Safety of the National Building Code of India 2016. It is generally conducted annually and looks at both passive and active fire protection.

1. Fire load — what is stored, in what quantity, and how it is arranged.
2. Compartmentation — whether fire and smoke can be contained where they start.
3. Means of escape — route widths, travel distances, signage, lighting and, critically, whether routes are actually clear.
4. Detection and alarm — coverage, functionality and audibility across the occupied areas.
5. Suppression — extinguishers, hydrants, sprinklers, pumps, foam and gas systems.
6. NOC and statutory status — whether the building's certification is current.

The Code also expects periodic inspection by the building's own occupants between audits. That expectation is the legal basis for the routine in-house rounds most organisations either run informally or do not run at all.

Healthcare: the 2026 guidelines

Revised national guidelines on fire and life safety in healthcare facilities, issued in 2026, set stricter protocols for fire prevention, evacuation planning, infrastructure safety and emergency preparedness in both public and private hospitals.

A hospital is the hardest case in fire safety: oxygen is piped into wards, electrical equipment runs continuously, and occupants frequently cannot evacuate themselves. Readiness therefore has to be continuous and documented rather than certified annually and filed. Civic audits have repeatedly found the opposite — in one city's fire safety audit, 165 of 504 hospitals were operating without a valid fire NOC.

Who is actually responsible

The owner or occupier. NBC 2016 Part 4 places the onus for keeping fire installations in working order on them, and the state fire acts place the certification duty in the same place.

This is worth stating plainly because the most common misconception in Indian fire compliance is that responsibility transfers to whoever services the equipment. It does not. An annual maintenance contract buys you a service; it does not buy you compliance, and it will not answer for a device that sat empty for four months between visits.

Where organisations usually fall short

• Nobody owns the due date. The schedule lives in one person's diary, and their leave becomes a gap in the record.
• Findings never close. The same obstructed exit appears in three consecutive audit reports because no owner and no target date were ever attached to it.
• The register cannot survive a question. Six months of identical ticks in one pen satisfies a filing cabinet but not an inspector asking who stood in front of a specific device.
• Interim exposure is invisible. A device goes away for a refill and nothing records whether the area it protected was covered in the meantime.
• Records are rebuilt three times. The same facts get reassembled in different formats for the fire officer, the insurer and the internal audit.

A practical compliance checklist

If you want to know where you stand without commissioning anything, work through this:

1. Can you produce a complete list of every fire device in the building, with its location to the area?
2. For any device on that list, can you show when it was last checked, by whom, and what they found?
3. Are your extinguisher refill and hydrotest dates current, and do you know which fall due in the next 90 days?
4. Is your statutory certification current, and do you know the next filing date?
5. How many findings from your last audit are still open, and who owns each one?
6. If a fire officer arrived this afternoon, how long would it take to assemble all of the above?

Most organisations can answer the first question and struggle from the second onward. That gap — between owning the equipment and being able to evidence its upkeep — is what fire audit software exists to close.