NEW DELHI MUMBAI : India’s national capital and commercial capital sit in seismic zones with high probability of earthquakes. Yet, local rules don’t require buildings in these and other cities in the country to follow structural standards to withstand a quake like the one that hit Nepal on Saturday.“Our codes offer the lowest level of earthquake safety protection. We are designing for one-fifth the intensity that might hit a particular earthquake zone,” says Sangeeta Wij, technical director at global design firm AECOM Safety experts also point out the absence of separate guidelines in India for highrise buildings, which are becoming a common sight in big cities. Builders, however, say present day buildings are designed to withstand high-intensity tremors and they often follow standards that are more stringent than what are required under local rules.The National Capital Region and Mumbai both fall under seismic zone 4, indicating that they are high-risk zones — zone 5 faces the highest probability of earthquakes. Sandeep Donald Shah, country head of Miyamoto International , a structural engineering firm, says all buildings in the NCR are designed to the lowest category of earthquake performance, which is collapse prevention.There are four categories of earthquake resistant buildings: Earthquake Resistant-Operational, Earthquake Resistant-Immediate Occupancy, Earthquake Resistant-Life Safety and Earthquake Resistant-Collapse Prevention. “While these buildings (which meet the minimum standards under Indian rules) will not fall, they will be rendered unusable,” says Shah.The Bureau of Indian Standards, he says, has agreed that they do not have a code for high rise buildings. “They have said they will now come up with a new code in 2015,” he says.This is after Shah filed a public interest litigation seeking directions from the court regarding educating the public about the different kinds of earthquake resistance in buildings.Manish Kumar, managing director, strategic consulting at JLL India , says in terms of structural safety standards, all builders are adhering to the standards prescribed by the government.“But in the case of very high-rise buildings, there is a need for having a separate code which is not present in India at the moment,” he says. “There is no way that standards made for 9-10 storey buildings should be used for mid and high rise buildings.”Builders, though, say there was nothing to worry. “IS 1893 is the Indian code revised in 2002 after (the 2001) Gujarat earthquake duly considering the structural failures witnessed. The present buildings are being designed based on IS 1893 and it provides design for even 30 storeys and above,” says Getamber Anand, the newly elected president of industry body Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India.Dharmesh Jain, president-elect of the Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry, says after the Gujarat earthquake, Mumbai has gone a level higher in terms of precautions and safety measures in construction. “Every developer in Mumbai is taking adequate precautions and deploying right technology and measures and the buildings are safe,” he says.Nobody can predict the intensity of natural calamity, but based on current codes, buildings in and around Mumbai are well equipped to withstand seismic forces, says Manoj Daisaria, architect and former president of the Practicing Engineers, Architects and Town Planners Association.“For the last 20 years, almost all of the buildings in Mumbai are designed and built keeping in mind that the city falls in seismic zone 4. All the projects undergo geotechnical assessment that analyses soil bearing capacity and soil strata that shows if it has base of fractured rock or basalt rock that can be loaded with any sort of structure,” he says.The problem, says AECOM’s Wij, is of the many buildings which aren’t properly engineered and unauthorised that are mushrooming in our cities. These buildings are likely to fall during the first big tremors.On the PIL filed by Shah, the apex court has recently asked the National Disaster Management Authority to undertake a public awareness campaign on a national basis through print and electronic media to educate the public about the four categories of earthquake resistant buildings and the detailed definition of each.The Supreme Court has also directed the central government to ensure that all real-estate projects launched in the country prominently display the earthquake resistant category in which they fall and also explain the connotations of the category as defined by the government.