NILGIRIS: The Nilgiris Documentation Centre (NDC) termed the death of 64-year-old former Air Force officer B Krishnamurthy of Jagathala in Ooty, who died in a rockfall near Burliyar, as culpable negligence and demanded that the state government compensate his family for the death and damages.
"This tragedy could have been avoided had the administration taken proper measures to caution people about the potential dangers posed by the setting in of the Southwest monsoon. Mere departmental meetings are of no consequence in a hill district like the Nilgiris. The administration is clearly guilty of fatal negligence. As a first step, in view of the anticipated severity of the Northeast monsoon, it is advisable to replace the current district Collector Lakshmi Bhavya Taneeru with someone with an engineering or geo-technical background to manage monsoon preparedness better," said Dharmalingam Venugopal, Director of NDC.
"As a long-term measure, the state government should constitute a high-level committee to assess the geological stability of the district, which has not been done for over 40 years. In the past decade or so, the Ooty-Coonoor road was widened in great haste, and warnings about potential landslides were ignored. Giant machines were used to gouge out mammoth rocks formed over millions of years, leaving the road margins highly vulnerable and dangerous," he pointed out.
According to him "A Geological Survey of India (GSI) team that inspected the minor landslides in 2013 identified four 'human causative factors', namely, 'vertical cutting' of slopes for road formation, 'loading the slopes' with heavy construction activities, 'bench cuts' and 'terracing' of slopes for construction and agriculture, and encroachment on 'stream banks'.
