India, June 18 -- The Delhi Fire Service (DFS) plans to nearly triple its fire station network, expand its firefighting workforce almost tenfold, and deploy AI-assisted dispatch systems, drones and predictive analytics under a 25-year overhaul of the Capital's emergency response system.

The official roadmap, reviewed by HT, notes that, with the city's emergency incident calls nearly doubling over the last two decades, emergency response infrastructure has failed to keep pace with rapid urbanisation. The primary objective, therefore, is to sharply reduce emergency response time, at least from 12-15 minutes to under 7 minutes in congested areas by around 2030.

Towards this, it proposes increasing fire stations from the current 71 to 120 b...