Tapi rumours cooked up

SURAT, June 7: Officials of the police and the geology and mining departments of the city have dismissed as baseless'' allegations of resi...

SURAT, June 7: Officials of the police and the geology and mining departments of the city have dismissed as 8220;baseless8221; allegations of residents of the Ashwani Kumar-Phulpada village areas that corpses and bones of those buried at the site were being unearthed by the rampant removal of sand from the Tapi river bed that flows alongside the cremation grounds.

While Geology department officials, for one, said categorically that there was no way corpses or unincinerated bones could make their way into the sand mined by contractors from the Tapi bed, the Katargam police said that though some locals were worried that sand was being mined too close to the burial ground, no complaint had been registered so far.

The Ashwini Kumar cremation site is barely 25 metres from the sand-mining sites. Infants are buried on the slopes leading down to the the river.According to Katargam-Ashwini Kumar councillor Navinchandra Vaghela, who is also the chairman of the Surat Municipal Corporation8217;s public works department, 8220;The issue came up because of a clash of interests between locals and sand-mining contractors. An attempt was made to sensationalise the issue, but it never existed in the first place.8221;

Geologist N O Mehta of the mining department, which leases out portions of the Tapi bed for sand-mining, also dismissed chances of human remains cropping up in the Tapi.

8220;In the first place, the contractors work only in the middle of the river bed. Moreover, they have dumped boulders and rocks along the edges of the bed to have a firm base for their vehicles8221;, he said.

However, local resident Shankar Machhi alleged that unchecked sand-mining was weakening the surrounding ground, and causing remains to come into the open.

The real reason for the varying versions of the issue seem to lie, as councillor Vaghela said, in the clash of business interests between the dozen-odd families of fishermen the Machhis and the sand-mining contractors.

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Incidentally, neither the geology department nor contractors have come across a single dead body while mining sand.