Eight more people have died under unexplained circumstances, following the 12 that died on Wednesday. In all, some 75 people have died in the last 45 days at what is supposed to be a government rehabilitation centre. But authorities continue to insist that the deaths are due to “natural causes” and have thus far refused to carry out autopsies.
What’s worse, authorities’ efforts to hush it all up, too, continues. On Wednesday, the bodies of the dead were cremated without an autopsy. Despite the public outcry over this, the authorities cremated six of the eight who died on Thursday — again, no autopsy was conducted.
Panic is growing at Beggars’ Colony. Some 300 inmates fled the place on Thursday while police and doctors at Isolation Hospital stuck to the line that no probe was necessary. Some 40 more are being treated for diaorrhea and vomiting at NPK and Isolation Hospital.
Home minister V.S. Acharya, who had on Wednesday said he would order post-mortems to be conducted, did a u-turn, saying that the deaths were due to gastroenteritis and hence there was no need for an autopsy. Chief Justice S.R. Nayak stepped in, taking up the case suo motu.
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6 die in wall collapse in Mumbai
N. Ganesh
Mumbai
In the third such incident this week, six persons were killed and four injured after a portion of a house collapsed onto its adjacent structure in Mumbra on Thursday afternoon.
The incident took place in the Sainik Nagar area, an illegal settlement on the hilly slopes in Kausa. At around 4.30 pm, a brick wall that was built at a higher altitude collapsed on the chawl placed lower down the hill. The wall collapse has been attributed to the soil being eroded away extensively; the earthquake that hit parts of Thane and Mulund on August 17 may also have worsened this erosion.
The deceased have been identified as Raj Patel, Rima Patel, Shamtidevi Umeshprasad Yadav, Seema and Madhuri. All of them had been inside the chawl at the time of the incident. 5-year-old Neha Patel is the only survivor of the collapse, as by a stroke of luck, she had gone out of the house to play. Her father Rakesh was at work when the wall collapsed. Rescue operations were hampered by the narrow paths and hilly terrain, which prevented the rescue teams from approaching the site of the collapse.
The state government has announced a compensation of Rs 1 lakh to the kin of the deceased.