Beyond the ashes of PIMS: why Pakistan needs a legal ‘Engineer-of-Record’ to stop preventable disasters

On the morning of August 26, 2026, a fire, allegedly triggered by a short circuit in an air-conditioning compressor, though the precise cause remains officially unconfirmed and under investigation, broke out on the third floor of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), in the nursery of the Mother and Child Healthcare Centre. Fifteen newborns were in the ward. Only one was pulled out alive. Fourteen infants, some barely three days old, were burned to death in the one place their parents had trusted to keep them safe. Within days, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered the suspension of eight officials, including the hospital’s executive director and the head of its neonatal department, and directed that criminal proceedings be initiated against those found responsible. An inquiry found what grieving families already suspected: the nursery had no fire alarm and no sprinkler system, and the hospital had no rehearsed procedure for evacuating an intensive care unit in an emergency. Whatever the final forensic finding on ignition source, that underlying condition, an unmonitored, unalarmed, unsprinklered ward, is itself the product of a building never held under continuous, legally enforceable engineering custody. It was a grimly familiar script. In June 2024, a similar electrical fire tore through the paediatric ward of Sahiwal Teaching Hospital in Punjab, killing eleven infants; the provincial government responded by arresting the medical superintendent and three senior doctors after discovering that the hospital’s fire extinguishers had long since expired. Two disasters, two years apart, both traced to the same root: buildings whose life-safety systems had quietly decayed since the day they were commissioned, and no one legally accountable for noticing. Assigning criminal blame to on-duty administrators or low-level maintenance staff, as Pakistan’s inquiry system tends to do, treats the symptom while ignoring the disease. The underlying failure is structural, not personal: the systemic absence of legally recognized, discipline-specific engineering custody over a building’s operational lifecycle. Let this be said as plainly as possible because it is the single point this piece exists to make: no amount of better procurement, faster inquiries, or harsher suspensions will fix this. The one reform that closes the gap is the statutory Engineer-of-Record (EoR), a named, licensed engineer who remains personally and legally answerable for a building’s structural, electrical, mechanical, and fire-life-safety systems for as long as that building is occupied. Every other proposal in this piece is secondary to, and exists only to reinforce, that single requirement. A pattern, not an anomaly: Pakistan’s fire record PIMS and Sahiwal are not outliers; they are entries in a long ledger that spans every category of building this framework would cover: legislative, industrial, and commercial alike. Even the seat of Pakistan’s Parliament has not been spared. On November 9, 1993, an electrical short circuit set fire to the National Assembly Hall inside Parliament House in Islamabad, severely burning and damaging the chamber where the country’s laws are debated; it remained out of service until a rebuilt hall was reopened in November 1996. A second, smaller fire broke out in the same building in June 2007, gutting the fourth-floor records of the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee and service branch in a blaze whose cause was never conclusively established. If the nation’s own legislature, built to the highest specification available at the time, was not immune to an undetected electrical fault, no ordinary public building can be assumed safe by default. The country’s worst example remains the September 2012 fire at the Ali Enterprises garment factory in Karachi, which killed more than 260 workers in what is still considered Pakistan’s deadliest industrial disaster. Investigators found a building with no fire exits, barred windows, and locked doors; most victims suffocated in a basement they could not escape. A shoe factory fire in Lahore that same night killed 25 more. More recently, in January 2026, a blaze at Karachi’s Gul Plaza, a four-storey market of some 1, 200 shops on M. A. Jinnah Road, killed at least 28 people and caused parts of the structure to collapse, weakening the adjacent Rimpa Plaza badly enough that engineers ordered emergency steel jacketing of its support pillars. A little over a year earlier, a short circuit at Karachi’s R. J. Shopping Mall on Rashid Minhas Road had killed 11 people in a strikingly similar fire. A legislature, a garment factory, a hospital nursery, a shopping plaza: different buildings, different decades, the same failure repeating itself. In every case, a fire-safety system that should have contained the blaze: a compartment wall, a sprinkler head, a clear exit, a properly rated circuit; either was never installed to specification or had silently stopped functioning long before the fire started, and no one held continuing legal responsibility for knowing it. Strip away the varying causes: welding sparks, expired extinguishers, a suspect electrical fault, an overloaded panel. Every single one of these disasters points to the same missing safeguard: a statutory Engineer-of-Record who could have been held to account for the building’s condition long before the fire, not merely investigated after it. The anatomy of lifecycle degradation In Pakistan, public, commercial, industrial, and high-density residential buildings are treated as static assets once construction concludes. Over decades of occupancy they are altered piecemeal: rooms are re-partitioned, HVAC ducts re-routed, structural cores drilled for new risers, and electrical circuits extended to feed equipment the original design never anticipated. When a building is first designed, consulting engineers establish precise safety baselines: smoke evacuation dynamics, fire-rated compartmentation, electrical panel capacity limits, emergency egress widths. Every one of those baselines assumes the building will keep being used the way it was designed to be used. Post-occupancy modifications made without reference to that original design intent quietly dismantle the safety margins built into it. An extra air-conditioning unit is wired into a panel never sized for the load. A door meant to compartmentalize smoke is propped open for convenience and never fitted with an alarm-linked closer. By the time disaster strikes, the building’s fire-safety envelope has been hollowed out long before anyone lights a match, or before a compressor overheats in a nursery. This is possible because Pakistani law does not enforce the concept of an Engineer-of-Record: a licensed professional engineer designated to hold continuous legal liability for the physical and life-safety integrity of a facility across its entire operational life, not merely during construction. Decoupling procurement (QCBS) from statutory custody (EoR) Policymakers reaching for a fix often converge on procurement reform, and there is a real problem to fix: government departments frequently hire engineering consultants through Least Cost Selection (LCS), which rewards the cheapest bidder rather than the most competent one. Replacing LCS with Quality- and Cost-Based Selection (QCBS), weighting technical merit at 80: 20 or 85: 15 against price, is a genuine improvement and should be made mandatory for any contract touching structural, electrical, or fire-safety work. But QCBS and the Engineer-of-Record solve two different problems, and conflating them is precisely how the current system fails. QCBS is a procurement tool: it governs how a consultant is hired. It creates no legal shield once the tender closes and the certificate of completion is signed. The EoR is something else entirely: a statutory custody framework that persists for as long as the building stands, independent of which firm was hired to build it or how that firm was selected. The EoR’s legal authority over design limits, load capacities, compartmentation, and life-safety systems must therefore sit above commercial contracts and procurement rules, not inside them. That means, concretely: ● A universal mandate across sectors: The requirement must apply to all public infrastructure, industrial plants, commercial centres, and private multi-family residential towers, not hospitals alone, and not government buildings alone. ● Discipline-specific designation: Statutory codes must recognize individual professional liability by discipline. An EoR (structural) retains exclusive authority over load-bearing alterations and core modifications. An EoR (MEP/HVAC) holds custody over electrical distribution limits, ductwork, and thermal loads; precisely the domain that failed at PIMS. An EoR (Fire & Life Safety) is answerable for sprinkler hydraulics, detection alarms, and egress routing. ● No contractual overrides: Even where a consultant is engaged through QCBS, that engineer’s technical sign-off as EoR cannot be waived, varied, or bypassed by a facility owner, hospital administration, or public works authority except through a formal, stamped change-of-record filing. Global precedents: how other countries anchor accountability Pakistan would not be inventing this idea. It would be catching up to systems already tested elsewhere. In the United States, state licensing boards require a named, professionally licensed Engineer or Architect of Record on virtually every building permit, and that individual remains liable for the design’s life-safety performance long after occupancy begins. Germany goes further with its Prüfingenieur, or check-engineer, system: an independently certified engineer, separate from the design team, reviews structural and fire-safety calculations before construction and again at key stages afterward, on the premise that the great majority of structural failures originate in flawed design assumptions that a second, empowered set of eyes can catch before they are built into concrete and steel. Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority requires every mechanical, electrical, and structural submission to be endorsed by a registered Qualified Person or Professional Engineer through its digital CORENET platform, creating a permanent, auditable record of who approved what, and when. The very traceability that Pakistani inquiry committees currently have to reconstruct from scratch after a tragedy. Australia offers a cautionary tale in the other direction: after the 2014 Lacrosse tower fire in Melbourne, a landmark government review found that the country’s building codes were sound on paper but routinely ignored in practice, because no one held continuous, enforceable accountability once a project was signed off. Its recommendations, which included stronger registration, clearer accountability chains, and better lifecycle record-keeping, are in essence the same reforms this piece proposes for Pakistan. Even within the region, India’s building bye-laws increasingly recognize an Architect-of-Record who remains answerable for fire exits, refuge areas, and structural compliance through to occupancy, though Indian professionals note that fragmented state-level enforcement and undervalued fees still blunt its effect, a warning Pakistan should heed as it drafts its own version. The common thread across every one of these systems is not the paperwork; it is the principle that professional accountability for a building’s safety does not expire when the ribbon is cut. Pakistan’s regulatory framework currently assumes the opposite. Integrating Design Intellectual Property Into Procurement (PPRA) A statutory EoR regime also requires public procurement rules to catch up with a basic reality: an infrastructure project’s engineering design is protected intellectual property, not a disposable drawing set. Under principles akin to PPRA Rule 42, which allows direct contracting for proprietary or IP-protected assets, public-sector regulations should require that any major structural, MEP, or fire suppression retrofit involve consultation with, or formal consent from, the original design consultant or the designated EoR. Correspondingly, third-party contractors should be legally barred from tendering for or executing alterations that touch core life-safety systems without formal, documented verification from the discipline-specific EoR. This closes the loophole through which a facility can quietly rewire its own risk profile, floor by floor, without any of the professionals who understood the original design ever being consulted. Codifying the framework: adraft statutory clause To give this architecture legal force, the Pakistan Engineering Council’s bye-laws and the building codes enforced by provincial and municipal authorities such as the Capital Development Authority, the Lahore Development Authority, and the Karachi Development Authority should be amended along the following lines. Section X. 1: Statutory Engineer-of-Record (EoR) Mandate and Lifecycle Custody (a) Mandatory designation. No public, commercial, industrial, or multi-family residential building shall be issued a Certificate of Occupancy without the formal designation of a licensed professional engineer as Engineer-of-Record for each relevant discipline: structural, mechanical/HVAC, electrical, and fire protection. (b) Mandatory modification approval. Over the operational lifecycle of the structure, no addition, retrofit, load alteration, or modification affecting structural integrity, electrical demand, fire compartmentation, or smoke management shall be executed without the prior written review, stamped calculations, and formal approval of the designated EoR for that discipline. (c) Supremacy over procurement mechanisms. Commercial selection processes, including QCBS or LCS, shall apply solely to the commercial engagement of consultants and shall under no circumstances waive, supersede, or diminish the statutory authority, legal liability, or approval rights of the designated EoR. (d) Formal transfer of custody. Where the original EoR becomes unavailable or is relieved of duty, legal custody may only pass to a new EoR registered with the Authority Having Jurisdiction, following a stamped peer-review audit and formal assumption of professional liability. (e) Enforcement and penalties. Occupying or operating a facility in breach of subsections (a) through (d) shall constitute a statutory offence, with penalties scaled to the class of building and calibrated to exceed any cost saved by bypassing EoR review, removing the financial incentive that currently favours cutting corners. An imperative for structural reform: legislate the EoRnow The disasters at PIMS and Sahiwal, the fires that have twice struck Parliament House itself, the Ali Enterprises inferno, and the collapse of Gul Plaza are not separate stories. They are the same failure recurring across every category of building Pakistan builds. Ad-hoc suspensions and 24-hour fact-finding committees identify who failed to notice a decayed building; they do nothing to stop the next hospital, factory, legislature, or shopping plaza from decaying the same way, unnoticed, for years. Public safety of this kind is not achieved through sporadic post-disaster inquiries, and it is not achieved through procurement tweaks alone. It is achieved by one thing only: a law that makes a named, licensed engineer permanently, personally, and professionally responsible for a building’s safety systems for as long as that building stands. That is what the Engineer-of-Record delivers and what nothing else in Pakistan’s current regulatory toolkit does. QCBS reform, PPRA amendments, and stronger PEC bye-laws all matter, but only as scaffolding around the EoR mandate, never as substitutes for it. Until Pakistan enacts the Engineer-of-Record as binding statute, universal across sectors, discipline-specific, immune to procurement override, and backed by real penalties, its hospitals, schools, factories, legislature, and homes will remain exposed to disasters that are, on paper, entirely preventable. Fourteen families in Islamabad, eleven more in Sahiwal, and hundreds more across four decades of factory and plaza fires have already paid the price of that gap. Parliament does not need another commission to study the problem. It needs to pass the EoR clause set out above. The legislature’s task now is to close this gap in law before it claims another life.

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