Fire and resident safety obligations for a PG

Fire compliance is a property question

There is no national PG fire rule. Fire safety in India is regulated by state fire service legislation, read with the National Building Code, and what applies to a given building depends on its height, the number of occupants and the use classification it falls under.

That has an uncomfortable implication for anyone converting a residential property. A building sanctioned and constructed for residential occupancy may not meet the requirements that apply to accommodation housing a larger number of unrelated occupants, and the gap is not something a certificate can close. Staircase width, a second means of escape, and the fire systems the Code expects for the occupancy are physical features of the building.

So the only reliable answer about your own premises comes from the state fire service for that building. An article cannot give it to you, and a consultant who quotes a single threshold without looking at the property is telling you what you want to hear.

What to establish for your building

Work these out specifically rather than generally, with the fire service rather than from a checklist.

• The use or occupancy classification your building falls under once it houses paying guests, which may not be the classification it was sanctioned as.
• Whether the building's height and occupant load bring it within the state's fire clearance requirement at all.
• The means of escape: how many, how wide, and whether they are actually unobstructed today rather than on the plan.
• Which fire systems the applicable rules require for that classification, and whether they exist and work.
• Whether a fire clearance, once obtained, needs periodic renewal in your state, and when yours expires.

The operational half, which costs nothing

Separate from clearances, there is a set of things that reduce risk materially and require no permission to do. Keeping corridors and staircases clear of stored belongings and parked two-wheelers. Keeping exits unlocked at night, which is the single most common fatal failure and usually done for security reasons. Servicing extinguishers and recording when. Making sure residents know where the exits are, which for a population that changes every few months means telling each new arrival rather than assuming.

Cooking is worth separating out. Where residents cook in rooms on gas, the risk profile changes substantially, and whether that is permitted at all is both a safety question and often a licence condition.

None of this is expensive. All of it is what an inquiry asks about afterwards.

Resident safety beyond fire

Obligations here come from several directions at once. Police intimation of residents is required where a local order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 is in force, and is about knowing who is living in the building. Some cities have adopted or proposed dedicated PG and hostel regulations which add their own conditions. And beyond any of that, an operator who controls the premises owes the ordinary duty of care that comes with that control.

For accommodation housing women, the measures that matter in practice are access control at the entrance rather than restrictions on residents, verified staff, lighting in corridors and approaches, and a complaint route that does not require the resident to raise it with the person the complaint is about. Curfews and visitor bans are commonly presented as safety measures and are better understood as control measures; they are also where PG operators most often attract legal challenge on the ground of restricting adult residents' liberty.

Staff verification deserves specific attention because it is routinely skipped. The people with keys and night access are the ones whose background matters most, and verifying them is both cheap and the thing residents assume has been done.