The Delhi Government may order a magisterial enquiry into the incident of a major fire at the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC), where 17 low floor air-conditioned buses, costing over Rs10 crore, were gutted. “A magisterial inquiry will be ordered by Transport Commissioner Gyanesh Bharti in the next one or two days,” said a senior DTC official.
The incident had taken place in the wee hours of January 1 at South Delhi’s Ambedkar Nagar DTC depot. After the incident, DTC’s Chairman-cum-Managing Director Debashree Mukherjee had appointed a three-member fact finding committee headed by Deputy Chief General Manager (Mechanical).
“Magistrate will probe the incident and DTC’s fact finding committee will be submitting its report to him or her,” the official said. The AC buses gutted in the fire were procured in 2009 at a cost of over Rs60 lakh each around four years back. All other buses were immediately taken out of the depot following the fire.
The fire, however, did not engulf a CNG filling station which was close to the parked buses. Police have already registered a case under Section 336 IPC (an act endangering life or personal safety of others) and Section 427 IPC (mischief causing damage). “We are also investigating this case from all possible angles,” said a senior police official.
Insiders say that it was a mystery that how fire took place at the depot. Residents of an unauthorised colony built right next to the depot alleged that the fire broke out after a group of drivers lit a bonfire and burst crackers near the parked buses to celebrate the New Year. Over a dozen houses in the building also suffered damages. A three-member probe panel was constituted to investigate the incident.
Eyewitnesses said the fire started around 3am. “We received a call at 3:20am and 11 fire tenders were sent to the spot. When our team reached the spot, the buses were on fire which had spread to a wide area of the depot. We immediately cleared the area and the fire was controlled in an hour,” a fire department official said. However, the flames could not be completely doused until 5:30am.