Kolkata flyover collapse: IVRCL top official held, total nine

Bhattacharya had fallen sick soon after the March 31 collapse and was admitted to a hospital. He was discharged Tuesday evening following which he was taken to Lalbazar for questioning. He was later arrested. With this, nine IVRCL officials have been arrested so far.

All the arrests have been made under sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC .

So far, the firm’s IVRCL Director Operations Gopal Krishnamurthy, Deputy General Manager of Project Monitoring Cell (PMC) S K Ratnam, Assistant General Manager Mallikaarjun Rao, Assistant Manager Debjyoti Majumdar, Structure Manager Pradip Kumar Saha, Project Manager Tanmoy Sil and senior engineers Shyamal Manna and Bidyut Manna have been arrested.

[related-post]

Talking about Bhattacharya, a senior police officer said, “He was the person who was to supervise the project… He was the head of the construction company’s Kolkata unit. He was the top man of the company who was in-charge of almost everything.”

Bhattarchya, an MTech from IIT Kharagpur joined IVRCL in June 2013, during his questioning said that he was “looking after the finance of the company”, the police officer said.

“Bhattacharya was reporting to Ratnam… So we are looking into that also,” the officer said.

A search would be conducted at IVRCL’s office in south Kolkata from where Bhattacharya used to work. “We will take his along with us during the search operation. We need to seize documents regarding the Vivekananda flyover,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kolkata Police will take the help of expert designers to ascertain the exact cause behind the flyover collapse.

According to a senior official, sleuths have spoken to the RITES, an engineering consultancy company and a team of experts would visit the mishap site at the Ganesh Talkies to “inspect” what led to the collapse of the flyover in southern part of the city last week.

“We have spoken to a team from the RITES today. We will recheck the design. A team of experts will soon visit the mishap site to carry out an inspection,” the senior officer said.

“They will check whether there was a problem with the design or there was a problem with the material or the execution of the plan that led to the collapse of the flyover,” the officer said adding that unearthing the “exact cause of the collapse” would take some time to come to fore.

The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government is facing fire from Opposition over the incident. BJP national secretary Siddharth Nath Singh has alleged that as then Railway Minister in the UPA government, Mamata knew that IVRCL was a blacklisted company. He made public some documents that “revealed” that Mamata had awarded the work of Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla project to the firm, which had later come under the CBI radar. The work was finally scrapped in 2014 for not having made any progress.

According to documents obtained from KMDA, Bengal Urban Infrastructure Development Private Limited (BUIDL), a joint sector company of the urban development department of West Bengal and IL&FS was assigned the work to construct Vivekananda flyover. BUIDL than awarded the work to IVRCL through a competitive bidding process. The work was awarded by the Left Front government in February 2009.

TMC spokesperson and party MP Derek O’Brien had earlier claimed that the prompt action by the Kolkata Police and the arrests made so far shows the government’s sincerity in ensuring that those responsible are brought to justice.