Lagatar24 desk
New Delhi, Oct 31: It was in a split second that Gujarat’s Morbi suspension bridge collapsed on Sunday. Over 133 are dead and 150 missing. A rescue operation is on. A high-power committee has been formed by Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel to probe the incident. A case has been initiated under IPC sections 304, 308, and 114, reports India Today.
The Jharkhand cable car tragedy, which occurred on April 12 and resulted in three fatalities, comes to mind in light of the Morbi bridge collapse. Hemant Soren, the chief minister of Jharkhand, then ordered an investigation.
There is a theme connecting these two accidents, aside from the probes that were requested. Both were being run without the relevant departments’ formal approval. While Morbi’s civic organisation asserts that the bridge was reopened without authorization, Damodar Infra was operating the ropeway in Deoghar in violation of the rules and without the permission of the Jharkhand Tourism Development Corporation (JTDC). The Deoghar ropeway and the Morbi bridge lacked fitness certifications.
The bridge began operating after renovation, however Sandeep Singh, the municipal chief officer of Morbi, claimed that no “fitness certificate” had been given to it. He said, “Historically, only 20 to 25 people used to go in a batch on the bridge that has always been there.” On the fateful day, more than 400 people at a time were allowed to be on the bridge.
Similar to this, a clause in the Deoghar event required Damodar Infra to practise rescue operations every three months in addition to doing daily, weekly, and biannual maintenance. The company, whose contract and licence expired in 2019, didn’t do any of this.
Even if the operators may get the blame from the state governments, both events indicate a conspiracy between the local government and the businesses in charge of their operations. Each time a person used the Morbi bridge, they were taxed Rs 50. When issuing the tickets, was the bridge capacity taken into consideration? It would be intriguing to learn how much cash the civic organisation in Morbi received from the operators as part of the agreement.
In the Jharkhand incident, despite receiving a fair share of the revenue generated by the operation of the ropeway, the state tourist department did not monitor the operation of the ropeway by the private enterprise.
“If Damodar Infra was operating without fulfilling the conditions and without abiding by the SOPs and without government permission under the nose of the administration, who is to be blamed? It shows the complicity of the state government,” BJP MP Nishikant Dubey reportedly said when the ropeway accident took place.
Even while the authorities may assert that the bridge was being used without a NOC, it won’t be shocking if the opposition makes the same charge against the state administration in the wake of the Morbi disaster.
This raises several fundamental and important queries: How feasible were these projects? If the government had taken preventative measures, might these incidents have been avoided? And if we dig a little deeper, we’ll discover that both smack of criminal negligence and blatant indifference on the part of those in charge of running them and those in charge of keeping an eye on them. The ones that suffer in silence throughout the blame game are the credulous individuals.
