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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Buried Lives

Pimpri-Chinchwad is fond of advertising itself as a model city. Its gleaming roads, industrial estates and ambitious infrastructure projects have helped make the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) one of India’s wealthiest civic bodies. The shocking accident in which eight labourers died after a massive garbage heap collapsed onto the administrative building of the Waste-to-Energy plant at Moshi, exposes the rot beneath PCMC’s outwardly prosperous edifice. The contrast is...

Buried Lives

Pimpri-Chinchwad is fond of advertising itself as a model city. Its gleaming roads, industrial estates and ambitious infrastructure projects have helped make the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) one of India’s wealthiest civic bodies. The shocking accident in which eight labourers died after a massive garbage heap collapsed onto the administrative building of the Waste-to-Energy plant at Moshi, exposes the rot beneath PCMC’s outwardly prosperous edifice. The contrast is impossible to ignore. A civic body flush with resources failed to prevent workers from being buried alive under its own waste. The facility should have been governed by the most basic principles of engineering and workplace safety. The Indian Army, the National Disaster Response Force, firefighters, police and municipal personnel have worked for days in dangerous conditions. Heavy excavators painstakingly removed unstable concrete while specialist teams searched for survivors. But their professionalism has only served to highlight the incompetence that had made their deployment necessary in the first place. Garbage dumps do not collapse without warning. Any administrative building situated in the shadow of such an unstable waste mass should have been subjected to rigorous risk assessment. If those assessments existed, they evidently failed. If they did not, the negligence is even graver. The tragedy also raises uncomfortable questions about the Waste-to-Energy project itself. It was inaugurated with much fanfare as a technological milestone, boasting India’s largest boiler of its kind. International engineering expertise and sophisticated machinery were proudly showcased. Yet impressive technology is meaningless if basic occupational safety is treated as an afterthought. Grand inaugurations make headlines. Routine maintenance rarely does. But it is the latter that determines whether workers return home alive. Municipal administrations have developed an unfortunate habit of measuring success in kilometres of roads laid, flyovers inaugurated and crores spent. The true measure of governance is far simpler. Can the poorest employee leave work safely at the end of the day? At Moshi, the answer is a devastating no. While compensation packages and promises of inquiries will inevitably follow and committees will submit reports, the danger is of responsibility becoming diluted across the chain of contractors, engineers and officials until accountability disappears into bureaucracy. That familiar script must not be allowed to play out again. PCMC cannot plead poverty nor cite a lack of technical expertise. It cannot claim that the dangers of unstable waste dumps were unknowable. A corporation with such financial strength possesses the means and the obligation to enforce the highest safety standards. The dead were casualties of preventable negligence. The wealth of a city is ultimately measured not by the size of its municipal budget, but by the value it places on the lives of those who keep it running. At Moshi, that value proved tragically cheap.

Unrest within Mahayuti

Updated: Jan 21, 2025

Mahayuti

Mumbai: The state administration on Sunday stalled the appointments of guardian ministers in Raigad and Nashik districts. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had cleared the appointments before he left for Davos in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum on Saturday. They are believed to have been stalled on behest of Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who heads the state in absence of the Chief Minister.


NCP’s Aditi Tatkare and BJP’s Girish Mahajan were entrusted with responsibilities of guardian minister for the Raigad and Nashik districts respectively, where Shiv Sena’s Bharat Gogawale and Dada Bhuse had staked claims. Gogawale is a first-time minister while, Bhuse had been the guardian minister of the district during previous government under Eknath Shinde.


Shiv Sena, NCP and BJP all the three constituents of Mahayuti have strong roots in both the districts. However, the Shiv Sena and the NCP had been particularly on loggerheads there. The Shiv Sena, which had been demanding the guardian minister’s post in Nashik district has managed to win only two assembly seats in the district where the NCP has Six and the BJP has Five MLAs. On the contrary, in Raigad the NCP has won only one seat while the Shiv Sena and the BJP both have Three MLAs each in the district.


Sunil Tatkare, MP from Raigad Lok Sabha constituency and the stat unit president of the NCP and father of Aditi Tatkare, had been the guardian minister of Raigad between 2004 and 2014. Gogawale had always been his political opponent before Tatkare joined the Mahayuti government under Ajit Pawar’s leadership in 2023. Gogawale claimed that all the Six Shiv Sena-BJP MLAs in the district had opined in his favour to be the guardian minister of the district and after the decision to appoint Aditi Tatkare was announced, his supporters resorted to violent protests. They burnt tyres in bid to stall traffic on highway in the district. Reacting to the developments, Tatkare said that the issue should be pondered over after CM Fadnavis returns from Davos on Saturday and settled amicably.


In Nashik Girish Mahajan had been the guardian minister of the district between 2014 and 2019 when Fadnavis was the Chief Minister.


The post of guardian minister doesn’t have any constitutional mandate and is considered to be a political appointment. Guardian ministers head the district planning and development councils (DPDC) that control the funds for development works being carried out in the particular district. This control wields much of political power to the minister in that district whereby spreading the party in the district becomes much easier. This is the reason why the grass root politicians seem to be very sensitive to such appointments.


While Gogawale and Bhuse are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian ministers, some others like NCP’s Hasan Mushrif and BJP’s Pankaja Munde are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian district in their home districts of Kolhapur and Beed respectively. DCM Shinde is learnt to have gone to his ancestral village Dare in Satara district after the decision and BJP’s firefighters Chandrashekhar Bawankule and Girish Mahajan are expected to meet him there to try finding a way out of the issue.

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