The Karachi administration has decided to launch a dedicated mobile application to centralise fire safety data for commercial buildings, shopping centres, and major public venues across the city, following a high-level meeting chaired by Commissioner Syed Hassan Naqvi that reviewed progress on the ongoing fire safety audit being conducted across Karachi’s commercial infrastructure. The application is intended to integrate all departments involved in disaster management and fire safety into a single accessible platform, providing rescue agencies with real-time information about a building’s fire safety arrangements and emergency facilities through a unified dashboard in the event of an emergency, enabling significantly faster and better coordinated responses than the current fragmented data environment allows.
The decision builds on an audit process already well underway across the city. Sub-Divisional Fire Safety Audit Committees, formed under assistant commissioners on the directives of Chief Secretary Syed Asif Hyder Shah, have been conducting inspections of commercial buildings, shopping centres, and large public facilities throughout Karachi, with more than 800 buildings already surveyed. Pakistan Disaster Management Authority system analyst Diyal Das Rathore informed the meeting that survey data from over 800 buildings had already been uploaded to the Fire Safety Audit Portal, including details of fire prevention measures and disaster response systems in place at each facility. Buildings found to be falling short of required fire safety standards have been issued formal notices, with owners directed to address identified deficiencies without delay. Officials also discussed the addition of further data categories to the portal to improve emergency preparedness for both fire incidents and natural disasters more broadly.
The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s Chief Fire Officer, Rescue-1122, Civil Defense, and the Sindh Building Control Authority are all participating in the audit campaign, with Civil Defense specifically tasked with identifying buildings that lack adequate fire safety arrangements. Commissioner Naqvi directed all relevant departments to actively cooperate, accelerate the audit process, and prioritise high-risk buildings in the remaining phases of the exercise. The planned mobile application represents the digital layer on top of this physical audit work, transforming data that currently sits in a portal into an operationally useful tool for first responders who need immediate access to building-specific safety information during emergencies. For a city the size of Karachi, where commercial density is high and fire incident response times are often complicated by traffic, building access challenges, and fragmented inter-agency communication, a real-time fire safety application of this kind has the potential to meaningfully improve outcomes when emergencies occur in audited buildings.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
