Published in: Professional Practices

Importance of Building Bye-Laws

Author guneet

Published on: July 1, 2010

Building Bye-laws are defined as the standards & specifications designed to grant minimum safeguards to the workers during construction, to the health & comfort of the users and to provide enough safety to the public in general. The regulation set out the basic requirements to be observed in the design and construction of buildings. They are applied to new building and also to extensions, material alterations, and certain changes of use of existing buildings.

A Building Bye-law is a local law framed by a subordinate authority for the betterment of the society. Building Bye-Laws channelize to achieve the policies and concepts outlined in the City Master Plans by the town planning departments, in order to give a specific ARCHITECTURAL CHARACTER to a city.

Building Bye-laws are an integral part of many organizations yet they are often misunderstood because there are different procedures and policies concerning how bye-laws can be established or governed by an organization. The town planning scheme controls the uses of land, roads, market areas, commercial places and surroundings, etc.

Each local authority has two types of areas under its jurisdiction:

1. GANTAL OR GOATHAN
2. REVENUE

Gantal or Goathan – have higher land value and the bye-laws are framed liberally

Revenue – have lesser land value and the area is in town planning scheme

Need and Importance of Building Bye-Laws

• The basis for modern bye-laws, requirements look mysterious always to layman & even to many officials & most of them are based on natural scientific laws, known properties of building materials & inherent hazards of users.
• The need for bye-laws becomes more important from the point of view in INDIA. The construction activity both in private and public sector in terms of building for residential, commercial, administrative and industrial user amount to 50% of outlay of any five year plan.
• With this certain projects can be delayed over a period of time to get completed. Eg. ST. MARK’S PIAZZA, hence it would loose their identity in terms of MASS & SPACE RELATIONSHIP.
• If we talk about the cities, if we loose control over the construction activity then the problems like Visual disorder, traffic becomes uncontrollable, uncomfortable living, environmental problems etc.

In the absence of suitable byelaws and the machinery to enforce these laws, the city will be in mess.

Objectives of Bye-Laws

• To make it easier to pre-plan the building activities.
• Gives guidelines to the designing Engineer or Architect.
• Prevents haphazard development without any resemblance to the development of the area as a whole.
• Gives safety (to humans who work & most importantly live in the buildings) against health hazard, noise, structure failure and fire (may be due to natural calamity).

Here is the presentation on the Importance of Building Bye-laws:

You may also refer to the building bye laws of Amritsar City – https://archistudent.net/building-bye-laws-of-amritsar-punjab/