India faces a shortage of about 9.4 million affordable homes in its cities, and building upwards is one of the few ways to close that gap on scarce urban land. Fire-safety rules are essential to protect residents, but they also influence building height, the number of homes a plot can hold and the cost of each home. This paper compares fire-safety regulation for residential buildings in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, drawing on international practice in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Japan.

The paper finds that the height at which the full high-rise fire regime applies varies sharply across the three states: 15 m in Kerala, 18.3 m in Tamil Nadu and 24 m in Andhra Pradesh. Crossing this threshold adds large fixed costs, so developers in Kerala routinely stop just below 15 m. Plots go underused and cities spread outward. The rules also focus on what a building must install at the time of approval rather than whether those systems still work years later. They act, in part, as a substitute for limited fire-service capacity: Kerala’s firefighters waited nearly a decade for aerial ladder platforms.

The paper recommends raising the high-rise threshold in line with the new National Building Construction Standards 2026, linked to proven fire-service capacity. It calls for a hybrid regulatory approach that allows engineered alternatives alongside prescriptive rules, third-party certification, and regulatory impact assessment of fire norms. It also calls for stronger checks after buildings are occupied, amendments to the Kerala Fire Force Act, 1962, and sustained investment in modern firefighting equipment. Reform, the paper argues, is not deregulation but a way to make fire safety both more effective and more affordable.