More than a third of lift safety checks failed at handover, and residents never saw the list

A few seconds. That is all it takes for a risk nobody noticed to become a life-threatening incident. One overlooked hazard, one preventable accident, and lives are suddenly at stake.

Lift incidents in residential communities are being reported more and more often, and they tend to follow a grimly familiar shape.

In one such case, a safety scare plays out in an apartment common area in a matter of seconds, over almost before anyone can react.

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In another, a lift jerks sharply mid-ride, the sort of jolt many residents have felt and quietly brushed off as normal.

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Each one looks random, as though a perfectly good lift simply turned dangerous one afternoon.

They rarely do.

Behind most of these moments sits a condition that was present long before the day of the incident, often from the day the building first changed hands. That is not a guess. It is what our own records show.

The findings

What we found inside the lifts

In our experience, the moment a builder hands a new building over to its residents' association is where a great deal first comes to light. Since 2017, Nemmadi has audited more than fifty new residential developments at exactly that moment, handover, when the common property passes from builder to association. Every one of those audits covered the lifts, and twelve went further with a dedicated, in-depth lift audit. All twelve are gated communities with multiple towers, ten in Bengaluru and its outskirts, two elsewhere in India. Across those twelve, whose complete records we hold in full, line by line, and which have on more than one occasion been produced as evidence in court in matters brought by residents' associations, this is what we have found.

Across those twelve projects, our engineers ran 3,543 individual lift safety checks, each one a straightforward pass or fail on safety and function. 1,283 of them failed, more than a third of everything inspected. Of those failures, just over a quarter, 347 in all, were serious enough for the inspecting engineer to mark high priority, meaning a direct threat to life, or a breach of statute or the relevant Indian Standard codes.

Among them: rescue devices that did not bring the car to a floor in a power cut, intercoms that had never been installed, and, most often of all, a missing statutory operating certificate for the lift itself.

These are not estimates. Each number is a count of a check that was actually performed and actually failed, with a written observation behind it. Every rate here is a rate per check, never per lift, and never per building.

What actually failed

The things residents assume are already true

The uncomfortable part is not the total. It is what failed.

Most people stepping into a lift assume a short list of things are simply true, that the licence on the wall is current, that the intercom reaches a human being, that the emergency light will come on if the power drops, that a rescue system will bring the car to a floor if it stops between them. Residents do not check these. They should not have to.

Yet these lift safety checks tell a different story. At handover:

• The statutory operating licence, displayed where residents can see it, was missing or not in order in 60% of the checks that tested for it.
• An intercom that lets someone shut in the car reach another person failed 41% of the time.
• A public-address system to tell passengers what is happening failed 39% of the time.
• Earthing at the cable glands, built to the Indian Standard, failed 38% of the time.
• A locked machine room, so that no one can reach the drive and the brake, failed 28% of the time.
• An emergency light that comes on the moment the power drops failed a quarter of the time.

The single most-failed condition on the whole checklist was not a mechanical fault at all. It was the lift's statutory operating certificate, missing, or not displayed where a passenger can see it, in 60% of the checks that tested for it. It is also the one failure on this list a resident can verify without any technical knowledge at all: stand in the lift and look for it.

Some conditions, in fairness, were reassuringly clean. Across the full lift checklist, 53 of the 111 conditions came back clean in every single test, 580 checks without a failure. Doors that close under their own power when the supply is lost passed every time they were tested, as did the floor indicator telling passengers where the car actually is. But the pattern across the rest is hard to unsee: the features that matter most when a lift stops between floors in a power cut, rescue, communication, light, are exactly the ones turning up in the failure column.

The pattern

Six patterns, one message

Grouped by the engineers' own observations, the 1,283 failed lift safety checks fell into a handful of recurring patterns: earthing and wiring compliance, machine room and shaft housekeeping, ride safety, lighting, rescue and emergency communication, and statutory paperwork.

"Getting people out", rescue devices, intercoms and emergency lighting, carried the highest proportion of high-priority findings of any group: more than half of them were flagged as serious. In plain terms, the failures most likely to matter in an emergency were also the ones our engineers were most concerned about. Two in five of the intercoms we tested could not do the job of connecting a trapped passenger to another person.

The report

The handover audit findings

The full field-findings report. Swipe or use the arrows to move through its pages, or open it full screen.

The timing

Why handover is the moment that matters

Handover is the one moment when the balance of power sits with the residents. Before it, the building belongs to the builder and the association has little standing to demand anything; after it, every defect quietly becomes the association's own repair bill. A handover audit exists to use that moment, to give the residents' association a clear list to hand back to the builder before it signs off on the building. Caught then, these are line items on a snagging list. Missed then, they quietly become the association's problem for years.

Here is the catch that should concern every managing committee. None of these 1,283 findings is the current condition of any lift. They are what was found at handover. Whether they were ever put right depends entirely on whether someone went back and ran the lift safety checks again.

And these are not neglected buildings. Every project in this analysis is one where the residents' association was organised enough to commission an independent audit in the first place, which likely makes them better run than average, not worse. If this is what the well-organised communities look like on the day they take possession, it is a fair question what the rest look like.

For a community that has already taken over its building, that is the real question. Was there a proper handover audit at all? Were the lift findings closed out, or lost in the rush to occupy? If no one knows, then no one knows whether the intercom in that car reaches anyone, or whether the rescue device will do its job the day it is finally needed.

The checklist

Ten things worth insisting on

Almost everything that failed in these audits can be checked deliberately rather than taken on trust, at handover, or at any point after. Ten worth insisting on, each one a condition that actually failed in the checks we ran:

1. The lift's operating certificate from the statutory authority, and that it is displayed inside the car.
2. A live test of the automatic rescue device, with the mains switched off, in every lift, proving it brings the car to a landing and opens the doors.
3. A real call on the intercom, to whoever is actually meant to answer it at two in the morning.
4. The machine-room key handed over, and the door locked behind you when you leave.
5. The emergency light proven with the power off, not merely switched on at the wall.
6. Earthing tested at the cable glands against the earthing code of practice, with the test record to show for it.
7. Every circuit labelled at the distribution board, so the right one can be cut in an emergency.
8. A ride in every car, watching the levelling between car floor and landing at each stop.
9. The lift pit inspected and cleared of construction debris and stored material.
10. The maintenance contract and service records, in writing, before the first invoice arrives.

The fix

An independent look should not be optional

Almost none of this needs a new law. The standards already exist, the Indian Standard codes our engineers inspect against. The lift's operating certificate already exists. The handover process already exists and is already governed. What is missing is simply somebody independent looking before an association signs off on the building. Make an independent condition report a normal part of that handover, and most of what we found would never reach the residents at all.

That is a change worth pressing for, and Nemmadi has pressed for it, putting the condition of buildings at handover to a public platform shared with the Chairman of Karnataka RERA, in writing to the Hon'ble Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, and into the public consultation on KAOMA, the draft Apartment Ownership & Management Act now being written to replace the 1972 Acts. An independent condition report, handed to an association before it takes charge of common property, is exactly the kind of clause that belongs in a handover obligation.

We should declare the obvious before anyone else does: Nemmadi sells handover audits, so we would benefit if such a check became standard practice. That is precisely why the requirement we argue for is an independent audit, by anyone competent and unconflicted, and not one that names or favours this firm.

The lifts in those incidents did not fail without warning. The warning was there at handover, written on a checklist. The only question is whether anyone read it.