Two weeks after the incident, the then Gurgaon DC, Nishant Kumar Yadav, reconstituted the committee probing the factors and circumstances that led to the collapse.It was in February when the ceilings of multiple flats collapsed at a posh housing society – Chintels Paradiso – in Gurgaon’s Sector 109, resulting in the death of two people. Now three months later, the Haryana government has decided to hand over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation for a thorough investigation.
Sources told The Indian Express that all the legal modalities have been worked out by the state government and procedures completed to hand over the case to the independent investigating agency. A senior officer privy to the developments told The Indian Express, “All the requisite reports that were required from the district administration and police department have been received by the state government. The case shall be sent to CBI for a thorough and deep investigation. Certain officials of the Town and Country Planning Department, district administration and other departments are in the dock for allegedly colluding with the builders in giving sanctions to the project despite structural flaws and violations of the requisite norms and procedures.”
“The state government also wants CBI to probe the manner in which the colony license was issued to the developers. The license was issued to the developers during the Bhupinder Singh Hooda led-Congress government in Haryana,” a source told us. On February 10, after two people died in the roof collapse of several flats in the building during a repairing work on the sixth floor of Tower-4 of the building’s D-block, Haryana Police had registered an FIR against Ashok Saloman, developer of Chintels Paradiso, and various others on the complaint lodged by Rajesh Bhardwaj, one of the residents of the housing society. Rajesh’s wife Ekta Bhardwaj was the first casualty in the incident. The roof collapse had begun on the sixth floor and stopped on the first floor of the tower.
Two weeks after the incident, the then Gurgaon DC, Nishant Kumar Yadav, reconstituted the committee probing the factors and circumstances that led to the collapse. The team was given the mandate of coordinating with the expert teams appointed by IIT, Delhi for the structural audit of the housing society and submitting a report in three months. The committee was also asked to supervise the resettlement of families residing in Tower-D and evaluate the prevailing market rates and cost of interior works of the damaged flats.
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The district administration had also ordered that in wake of the structural defects in about 100 flats of towers E, F, G and H of the housing society, the cost of possible shifting of the families residing in those towers would also be borne by the developer. Besides that, the committee was also asked to determine if the structure of the affected block (Tower-D) could be made habitable after making necessary improvements.
While the preliminary investigation reports of the district administration and committee probing the circumstances that led to the report hint at the possibility of substandard construction material and structural flaws; the developers refuted claiming that they had used the “highest quality of material and workmanship for the project”.
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