Building codes and Indian cities

@financialexpress.com

A striking thing about India’s urban evolution is that all our post-independence cities look and feel the same, characterised by uniform box-like buildings and Cartesian “layouts”. In contrast, most pre-independence cities like Mysore, Varanasi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta had distinct identities that reflected their cultural heritage,economic role & local climate.Infact,most indian cities still depend largely on iconic buildings from the colonial and pre-colonial periods for their character.

So, how did our cities end up with this uniform look-and-feel? As we shall show in this article, a key factor is the inordinately prescriptive building code that ended up dictating urban outcomes. The National Building Code (NBC), published since 1970 and currently running into about 2,200 pages, was meant to ensure standardised regulations on structural integrity, safety and hazard management. However, in addition, it demands compliance to unnecessary top-down norms on form and usage. The NBC ends up dictating the state level building bye-laws. In short, the building code ‘tail’ has ended up wagging the urban-form ‘dog’.

In private dwellings, for instance, the NBC stipulates minimum floor area, width, and height of habitable rooms with separate specifications for the ‘first’ and ‘second’ room; for kitchens—separately for ‘with’ and ‘without’ dining area. The Development Control Rules & General Building Requirements of NBC states: “In case of multi-storeyed multidwelling apartment, an office-cum-letter box room of dimension 3.6 m x 3 m shall be provided on the ground floor. In case the number of flats is more than 20, the maximum size of the office-cum-letter box shall be 20m2.” Why should the residents be restrained from having a larger letter-box room? Clearly, this is unnecessary interference.

In case of public spaces, the NBC lays out land requirement for setting up different kinds of commercial, educational, healthcare, and socio-cultural facilities. The regulations even prescribe different land area requirements for different types of colleges. For example, a minimum 6 hectares is required for an engineering college, 15 hectares for a medical college, and 5 hectares for a general college. Surely, this should be determined by the founders of these institutions and perhaps the relevant government authority, not by building codes.

Take another example, “The minimum land area required for a divisional sports centre is 20 hectares and that for a district sports centre is 8 hectares”. The size of a sports hub surely depends on the sport being played rather than whether it is a divisional or district level hub.A local cricket field will need more space than even the national badminton academy.

Such excessive details means that the attention of builders,architects & even urban authoritiesis mostly spent in making sure that these norms are adhered to.In turn,it creates rent-seeking oppurtunities.Most importantly,things such as the exterior architecture,interaction of the building with the public realm,and creative re-use of interiors are ignored.

An even more important impact on India’s urban form originates from the NBC regulations on setbacks, parking, and Floor Area Ratio (FAR) that are unnecessarily restrictive. It will come as a surprise to many readers that Indian cities have a lower FAR as compared to most major cities across the world. This has had enormous consequences.

First, it has led to huge wastage of productive and expensive land and inefficient use of urban spaces. The mandated margin and setback requirements have led to a lower building footprint as a lot of the land is wasted between boundary walls and passageways. Contrast this with how buildings in successful cities like New York, London, and Paris are usually built without gaps and extend to the footpath. A study by Byahut (2020) found that the building footprint in Ahmedabad was only 34.7%, whereas it was 56% for Paris, 59.6% for Barcelona, and 65.6% for London.

First, it has led to huge wastage of productive and expensive land and inefficient use of urban spaces. The mandated margin and setback requirements have led to a lower building footprint as a lot of the land is wasted between boundary walls and passageways. Contrast this with how buildings in successful cities like New York, London, and Paris are usually built without gaps and extend to the footpath. A study by Byahut (2020) found that the building footprint in Ahmedabad was only 34.7%, whereas it was 56% for Paris, 59.6% for Barcelona, and 65.6% for London.

Second, restricting denser growth of buildings have discouraged compact development and made useable land expensive. This has resulted in rapid outward expansion of Indian cities, leading to urban sprawls. Often, the sprawl extends into rural areas, where all norms are flouted anyway, including the ones on safety. Moreover, it makes infrastructure investment less efficient and expensive by forcing provision of amenities like water supply and public transport to be spread over an unduly large area.

Regulations aimed at structural integrity and safety are essential, but the current NBC (and similar regulations) has trapped Indian cities into uniform drabness. In recent years, there has been some revival in architectural creativity, but this is not due to a change in thinking about building codes. Better buildings are being built despite the building codes by getting exemptions or sometimes even by flouting the norms. What is needed is a simpler code to focus on structural integrity and safety of the building. To address other things like urban form, external architecture, efficient interiors, basic amenities, look-and-feel of neighbourhoods and so on, we need more localised solutions rather than mechanical top-down building codes. One way to achieve this is through use of ‘Form Based Codes’ that we will discuss in our next article.

Author : Sanjeev Sanyal (Indian Economist) & Aaakanksha Arora