The Gurgaon Fire Department’s only hydraulic ladder has been lying defunct at the DLF Sector 29 fire station for the last year and a half. In any case, the ladder is designed to reach only up to 42 metres – or about 14 storeys.
Ghaziabad Chief Fire Officer Rahul Pal said the Fire Department has only 22 fire tenders for the whole of the district with an area of about 780 sq km and a population of 4.7 million (2011 Census).
Existing fire insurance is mainly corporate or industrial – in the absence of a regulatory requirement, not many individual homeowners voluntarily opt for cover.
“I had put all my savings in our home. There is nothing left,” businessman Anurag Sharma, who lives in a tenth floor flat, said. “My wife had gone to drop our children to school when the fire broke out.…
