The Lift Stopped Between Floors, and No One Noticed for 90 Minutes

After a fire on the 12th floor of a residential tower in Undri killed a teenager, and the building's sprinklers and alarms reportedly failed to work, Pune Municipal Corporation gave societies a seven-day ultimatum to get their fire systems working.

Months later, PMC fire department data told the real story. Thousands of societies, hotels and commercial establishments are required to self-certify their fire systems every six months on Form B, and only 489 had submitted it. Everyone agreed something had to change. Almost nobody filed the paperwork.

The law is not thin here. Under the Maharashtra Lifts, Escalators and Moving Walks Act, 2017, a lift needs a licence from the Electrical Inspector (Lifts), and as reported, the licence is renewed every five years and the Electrical Inspectorate is meant to carry out safety inspections twice a year, separate from your AMC. For fire safety, PMC requires high-rise buildings to get Form B (or Form D, depending on category) recertified every six months by a licensed agency, confirming that sprinklers, alarms, fire doors and water supply actually work. Check the exact forms and timelines that apply to your building and city.

What keeps failing is the second step: making sure the inspector or technician actually comes, actually tests the equipment instead of signing at the gate, and actually gets paid to repair what is found broken. A monthly AMC visit that does not open the logbook is not maintenance. It is a visit. A fire system tested once at installation seven years ago is not a fire system. It is decoration.

Most committees learn that a lift licence or a fire certificate has lapsed only after something goes wrong, because nobody owns the calendar. Treasurers track money. Secretaries track letters. Almost nobody is asked to track dates: when the lift licence is due, when the last safety inspection happened, when the fire certificate needs filing, and when the AMC contract itself is up for renewal. That last one often comes with a price hike and a quiet cut in scope that nobody notices.

None of this needs a new law or a large budget. It needs a few habits:

• Read your lift and fire AMC contracts again. Compare what they promise every month with what has actually happened. If the contract promises a monthly visit with logbook entries for brakes, cables, lubrication and sensors, ask to see the logbook. If it has not been signed in three months, you have an invoice and not an AMC.
• Keep the AMC and the statutory inspection separate. Your lift vendor's monthly service is not the Electrical Inspectorate's safety inspection. Your housekeeping staff's fire check is not the licensed agency's Form B or D recertification, which has to be filed with the municipal fire department and not left in a drawer. You should be able to produce both papers independently.
• Put a name against every renewal date. Not 'management will handle it', but one committee member for the lift licence, one for the fire certificate and one for the AMC renewal.
• Track dates in one shared place that survives a change of committee. A shared spreadsheet with reminders works. So do society management tools that let you log AMC visits, upload certificates and get reminders before expiry. The point is that a lapse becomes 'the system warned us three weeks ago' and not 'we forgot'.
• Do a quarterly walk-through yourselves. Check that fire extinguishers have not expired, the lift logbook is current, and the exits are not blocked by someone's extra almirah.

The Sinhagad Road incident also points to something simple. A child alone in a lift should be a rare event, and the lift should have a working alarm and intercom that someone actually hears. Test the alarm button and the intercom during the monthly AMC visit, make sure it rings at the security desk, and tell the guard what to do the moment it does. Ninety minutes is a long time for a button to ring in an empty room.

Safety work is easy to postpone because the cost is certain and the benefit is invisible. Show AMC fees, statutory inspection fees and repair of defects found as separate lines in the budget, so the General Body can see what safety costs and what has been spent. A repair flagged in an inspection report that is not funded is a risk the committee has chosen to carry.

The boys in these incidents were not unlucky in some abstract way. They were in buildings where a maintenance system that looked fine on a contract had quietly stopped working in practice. The gap between 'we have an AMC' and 'the AMC is actually happening' is the real safety failure in most housing societies, and it can be fixed without waiting for the government to force the issue.