ooking into the significant changes in the building construction such as multiple occupancies, high rise buildings, etc. during the past two decades, there have been increasing number of fire incidents in buildings, which have raised concerns about fire safe design of buildings.CSIR-CBRI is uniquely placed to carry out R&D in all the areas of habitat planning and building construction. It has a distinctive Fire Engineering Laboratory, which is active in research on various aspects of fire safety in built environment.

This Handbook on “Design of Fire Safe Buildings: Understanding and Using NBC Provisions” is a welcome addition as it provides guidelines in a manner which can easily be understood by all the professionals and students, etc. The Handbook is simple and easy to understand and it adds to our efforts in making built environment fire safe.

The efforts of Dr. Shorab Jain, Dr. Ashok Kumar and Prof. Surendra Kumar to bring out this publication are praise worthy. I hope the Handbook will be able to create a better understanding amongst various stakeholders, which will be helpful in evaluating and improving their building designs leading to construction of more fire safe built environment.