Manali tragedy: No signboards, no safety measures point at negligence

In the aftermath of the tragedy in the Beas river in Manali in which 24 students from the VNR Vignana Jyothi Engineering Institute in Telangana were washed away and killed by the sudden release of water from the Larji Dam, the finger-pointing has begun in right earnest. [caption id=“attachment_1563867” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Bonath Shekar Naik wails for his son Rambabu. AP[/caption] Three dam authority officials, engineers MS Dadwalia and Mandeep Singh and technician Harwansh Lal, have been suspended. Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh has ordered a high-level inquiry into the incident. But are the dam authorities to be blamed for suddenly releasing water from the Larji dam? That has been the biggest question around the incident to date. According to a report in The Indian Express, at about 6 pm on Sunday, the demand for power generation from the Larji dam had decreased. “At around 5:50 pm, the state load dispatch centre at Shimla reportedly asked the Larji authorities to reduce power generation as it had touched 138 MW against its installed capacity of 126 MW,” said the report. As a result, at around 6:15 pm, dam operators released water from the dam, which was full to the brim. This raises the question of why the authorities decided to stop power generation when the dam, which has a small storage capacity of one or two days, was full. Moreover, the report adds that another peculiarity was that the dam was full to the brim in the peak of summer. This could suggest inefficient management of the water levels in the dam. The report also states that “the project authorities had been releasing excess water in the Beas, almost without prior warning, since Friday. So on Sunday evening too, they followed the same practice, not realising the tragedy that was waiting to unfold”. Another point of dispute is whether the dam authorities actually sounded a warning alarm or not. A report in The Times of India brings out the conflicting viewpoints on the issue. On one hand, “dam authorities rejected charges of negligence, saying they were within their rights to release waters in a hurry. Dam officers, who did not want to be named, claimed they had sounded the mandatory hooters in time,” said the report. On the other hand, the locals said that a hooter was only sounded after the accident as a face-saver. The report added that “hooters with higher frequency will now be installed at Larji dam site… The state electricity board managing director P C Negi said that hooters of 2 to 3km sound frequency would be installed along the riverbank to ensure the safety of people downstream.” Apart from the locals, students from the engineering college in Telangana who survived the incident also say that neither was any alarm sounded before the incident nor was there a danger mark signboard had been put up near the site. A  report in IndiaToday quotes a  student named TV Suharsha who said their group included 48 students, three faculty members and the child of a faculty member.  “We were all sitting on the rocks, taking photos…After about 10 minutes, the water level started rising…The locals were also helping us. About 15-20 students were washed away in front of us,” said Suharsha in the report. The Himachal Pradesh government admitted there had been lapses in connection with the tragedy. Politicians from Telangana are also angry at the dam authorities for their alleged inefficiency. “It was not an accident, it was negligence. There was no warning or safety measure there,” said K Kavitha, a Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) MLA from Telangana in a report on NDTV. Moreover, Telangana Home Minister Narasimha Reddy has demanded criminal action against the dam and college authorities.