Inquiry panel holds review meet on deaths at award event

Navi Mumbai: The one-member fact-finding committee on Thursday held a meeting in Mantralaya as part of its inquiry into the Maharashtra Bhushan Award ceremony tragedy, which left 14 dead due to sun stroke while many others were admitted to hospital. Additional chief secretary (finance) Nitin Kareer, who also holds the additional charge of revenue department, is probing the incident. Six different department officials had attended the first meeting of the probe committee, including the Raigad collector. The award event was held on April 16 at Kharghar.The hour-long meeting held in the revenue department was attended by secretaries of culture and tourism departments, representative of the Konkan divisional commissioner Mahendra Kalyankar (also chairman of local organising/management committee of the award event), Mumbai suburban collector, commissioner of Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation Rajesh Narvekar, Raigad collector Yogesh Mhase and commissioner of Panvel City Municipal Corporation Ganesh Deshmukh, among others. The culture department had on May 3, 2023, issued a government resolution forming the fact-finding committee under the chairmanship of additional chief secretary (revenue) to submit the report within a month. The terms of reference of the inquiry are to get detailed facts of the incident, facts on the works assigned to the agencies functioning under the ‘local organising/management committee’, the relief works done by these agencies immediately after the tragedy and to recommend steps to be taken care of while organising such events in the future.Police and a few other agencies are likely to be called separately for another meeting. While Raigad collector Yogesh Mhase only said he had attended the inquiry committee meeting, NMMC chief Narvekar said, “My Panvel counterpart Ganesh Deshmukh and I left early from the meeting to attend a major event in Navi Mumbai.”