BENGALURU: A city court has expressed its displeasure over government and civic bodies shirking their responsibilities in safeguarding rights of labourers rights. The court granted anticipatory bail to two BWSSB engineers who were booked for the manhole tragedy at C V Raman Nagar which claimed three lives on March 7.
Bannikatti Hanumanthappa R, 14th Additional City Civil and Sessions judge, while granting bail, observed, “In my opinion, even though it is said that there is no responsibility of the government or quasi-government authority for such incidents and only the contractor attending to the work will be responsible for the same, such type of defence shall not be taken by anybody on the side of the government.”
“It is their responsibility to pass necessary circulars and orders to prevent such incidents by giving responsibility to jurisdictional officers,” the judge said.
The court granted anticipatory bail to Chandrashekar S, Assistant Executive Engineer, (Dasarahalli CMC), Anand Rao Circle sub-division, and Siddaray Tawarkhed, Assistant Engineer, K R Puram circle, last Saturday. Police had booked them under IPC 304 (causing death by negligence).
The court has also directed the BWSSB officials to deposit `1 lakh in surety, not to tamper with the prosecution witnesses and not indulge in committing similar offence in future.
Three officials of Ramky Infrastructure, the company contracted by BWSSB, have also been booked and were arrested.
The public prosecutor representing Byappanahalli police opposed the anticipatory bail petitions saying, “There appears to be prima facie evidence against BWSSB officials that they been negligent on their part without giving proper instruction to the contractor to attend to the work on spot.”
The BWSSB officials contended that they were in no way related to the case as they were not informed about the works being carried out by the contractor. They said, “Police refused to receive a complaint from BWSSB.
Therefore, we lodged the complaint online against the contractor Ramky Infrastructure Ltd. and received a acknowledgment from the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Halasur.”