Announcement of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI) and the Karnataka State Fire and Emergency Services (KSFES) Department on fire safety certification has raised quite a few eyebrows in the real estate industry.

While an industry expert questioned how “credible” would the entire process be, if the issuance of a no-objection certificate (NOC) and a clearance certificate (CC), which earlier took months or even years, would now have to be completed within 30 days. “Currently, the KSFES has been manually going through each drawing and then mulling over all the errors and suggestions. This consumes a lot of time. According to our MoU, we will be providing software prepared by a company which would identify the errors in the drawing. It would indicate whether a particular project proposal is in acceptance of the norms by highlighting the faults in red colour. Then at the click of a button, the department can either condone or reject the proposal. The company has provided similar software to civic bodies of other places like Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Nagpur and other places. Hence, their credibility is established,” asserted Sushil Mantri, under whose President ship CREDAI signed the MoU. He argued that it is important to make this move as almost 90 percent developers are suffering because a handful of builders did not follow norms.

“CREDAI members are responsible for almost 60-70 percent output of the city. Further, to become a member of the confederation, they have to sign a code of conduct which covers all the approvals and rules. By delaying progress of approvals, not only do builders incur losses as production suffers, but also the revenue to the city and BBMP is further delayed,” he said.