PIL blames it on district administration, tourism development corporation

Patna | Monday | 16th January, 2017

Summary:

But proper arrangements had not been made by the corporation for their transportation and safety.People, the petition says, started panicking after it was announced around 3pm that the tourism corporation’s boats would not ply after 4pm. This led to overloading on the few private boats plying in the Ganga. One of such “overloaded” boats sank, killing 24 people.The Bihar chief secretary, home secretary, DGP and other senior state officials have been made respondents in the PIL, which also alleges that there was no arrangement for crowd management. “Divers were not deployed... While sufficient number of boats were not arranged for common people, the State Disaster Response Force boats were being used for ferrying dignitaries,” the PIL says.Meanwhile, at least 100 National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel on Monday continued their search operations in over 30km area in the river in which the boat sank on Saturday evening.“Even though we don’t have reports of any more missing person, we sent a team today to Fatuha in the downstream of Ganga to check whether any body was swept that far,” NDRF’s Battalion 9 commandant Vijay Sinha told TOI..