The Bombay High Court on Thursday granted bail to a structural consultant arrested in connection with the collapse of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj's statue at Malvan in the Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra. The consultant, Chetan Patil, approached the high court after a sessions court had rejected his bail plea, observing that there was prima facie evidence that iron was used instead of stainless steel for the 35-foot-tall statue. A single-judge bench of Justice Anil S Kilor observed that there was no case made out to implicate Patil as he had not been appointed as the statue's structural designer and had only submitted a structural stability report for the pedestal, which was intact even after the collapse. Patil stated that he worked as an assistant professor and had no involvement in the offence. He claimed that, at a friend's request, he had only provided a stability report via WhatsApp. He emphasized that this report was specifically for the statue's platform or pedestal, not for the statue itself. The bench will hear one Jaydeep Apte's bail plea on November 25. Apte was the sculptor of the Shivaji statue that collapsed in Malvan on August 26. Last month, a sessions court rejected Apte's bail plea. In his bail application before the high court, Apte claimed that the sessions court failed to consider that the FIR was filed in haste by a civil engineer with no expertise in metallurgy and that the case was not based on any scientific report. PM Narendra Modi unveiled the Shivaji statue by the coast at Rajkot Fort in Malvan on December 4, 2023. The sessions court noted that the statue's collapse within a few months of its construction clearly indicated issues with the quality of work.
