Fire Dept to charge fee for issuing NOC
Shivani Bhakoo
Tribune News Service
Ludhiana, December 7
There is a proposal pending approval from the Technical Committee that from now onwards, a fee will be charged by the Fire Safety Department from industrial/commercial/mixed land use units for issuing no objection certificate. The amount will be used for providing better infrastructure and safety kits to the fire staff here.
The letter, which will be presented before the Technical Committee, says many incidents of fire have been reported in the city in the past few days. These, small and major incidents, claimed precious lives. In most cases a short-circuit was cited as the reason for fire. And most unfortunate part is that none of these units has obtained no objection certificate from the Fire Department.
At present, the NOC is issued by the department free of cost. Not many industrialists applied for the NOC for obvious reasons. As per the records of 2016-2017 with the Municipal Corporation, the number of industrial/commercial units was about 55,000 (which file property tax returns). According to an UID survey, their number is over 1 lakh.
Now, coming to the rescue of the ailing Fire Department, the MC is all set to charge units a fee for issuing NOCs. The annual NOC fee has been divided into slabs, depending on the area of the unit. The units will have to get the NOC renewed every year by paying some amount.
