A month after 86 people died during Cyclone Tauktae , when barge P-305 and tugboat Varapradha sank in the Arabian Sea, Mumbai’s Yellow Gat...
A month after 86 people died during Cyclone Tauktae, when barge P-305 and tugboat Varapradha sank in the Arabian Sea, Mumbai’s Yellow Gate Police booked the owners of Varapradha for culpable homicide.
The First Information Report was filed on June 24 against Mumbai-based Glory Ship Management, which owns Varapradha, and its managing director Rajesh Shahi. The complainant, Varapradha’s second engineer Francis Simon, has alleged that the tug boat was in a poor condition and sank because Glory Ship Management did not follow the safety standards required by law for ships registered in India.
Simon is one of the two crew members of the tugboat to survive the accident on May 17. The remaining 11 crew members of Varapradha died at sea after the boat capsized.
Both Varapradha and barge P-305 had been chartered by Afcons Infrastructure Limited to facilitate maintenance work at the Mumbai High, an oil field located 176 km off the coast of Mumbai and owned by the government-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. P-305 is owned by Durmast Enterprises, a company registered in Seychelles but managed by Indian owners.
A high-level inquiry committee instituted by the Union government is investigating who was responsible for the vessels being stranded at sea despite advance warnings about the cyclone. Meanwhile, Simon’s FIR,...
