Police have registered a case against unidentified persons in connection with the blast at an explosives manufacturing factory in Maharashtra’s Nagpur district that claimed nine lives, officials said on Monday.
Search teams have recovered a number of body parts from the site at the Solar Industries India factory in Chakdoh where the blast took place on Sunday, they said.
Opposition legislators in the state alleged lapses by the company in ensuring the safety of workers and demanded action against the industrial safety department officials.
The bodies of the victims were blown to pieces due to the severe intensity of the explosion and the building collapsed, an official from Kondhali police station said. He said search teams have so far recovered more than 50 body parts from the site of the incident.
A case has been registered against unidentified persons under Indian Penal Code Sections 304 (a) (causing death by negligence) and 286 (negligent conduct with respect to explosive substance) on a complaint of Kondhali police station’s assistant police inspector Pankaj Waghode. “The accused persons would be identified during the investigation,” the official said.
The body parts have been sent to the Government Medical College & Hospital (GMCH) here for post-mortem and DNA analysis to identify the deceased, sources said.
After the panchnama, the body parts, kept in different packets, will be matched with the samples of relatives for identification.
The remains of the victims will be sent for forensic analysis before being handed over to the relatives, they said.
Work was on to remove debris from the blast site, a senior police official said.
Raising the issue in the state Legislative Council on Monday, Opposition leader Ambadas Danve (Shiv Sena-UBT) demanded a report from the Nagpur district collector to fix accountability and demanded action against officials concerned from the industrial safety department.
Danve, who visited the blast site, said the bodies of the deceased were dismembered. “Mandatory safety drills had not been conducted at the company and even officials from the industrial safety department were denied access to the premises,” he said.
Danve said workers at the factory were forced into early morning shifts after working late the previous night.
Congress MLC Shashikant Shinde said: “This isn’t the first time that an explosion occurred in the company. There were two such incidents in the past.”
Referring to the Rs 20 lakh compensation announced by the company to the victims and Rs 5 lakh by the state, Shinde wondered whether the government is placing a monetary value on the lives of innocent people. “Around 4,000 workers are employed on a daily wage basis in the company on a meagre Rs 10,000 a month,” he said.