Maha landslide: NDRF calls off operation, says minister; no body found on Sunday, tolls stays at 27
Mumbai, Jul 23: The National Disaster Response Force has finally called off its search-and-rescue operation in Wednesday's landslide in Irshalwadi in Maharashtra's Raigad district, state minister Uday Samant said on Sunday.
Addressing a press conference, Samant, who is guardian minister of Raigad, said the decision was taken in consultation with the district administration and other concerned authorities as well as local residents.
So far, 27 bodies have been recovered while 57 are untraceable, officials said, adding that no body was found from the debris on Sunday.
These include 12 men, 10 women and four children, while one corpse has not been identified as yet, they added.
At least 17 of 48 houses in the remote tribal village, which is at least an hour away from a motorable road, were fully or partially buried in the landslide that took place around 10:30pm on July 19.
The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and other agencies resumed the search and rescue operation for the fourth day on Sunday at Irshalwadi, some 80 kilometres from Mumbai, after calling it off the previous evening due to darkness and inclement weather.
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2019 mud attack on engineer: Maharashtra court sentences BJP minister Nitesh Rane to one-month jail
Mumbai (PTI): A court in Sindhudurg on Monday convicted Maharashtra minister Nitesh Rane in a 2019 case of pouring mud on an NHAI engineer when he was in opposition, and sentenced him to one-month imprisonment, noting that lawmakers are not supposed to take the law into their hands.
Later, the court suspended Rane's sentence, allowing him time to appeal before a higher court, while acquitting 29 other accused in the case.
"Even though Rane's intention was to raise a voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the people, he was not supposed to humiliate or insult a public servant in public," additional sessions court judge V S Deshmukh stated.
"If such incidents continue to occur, public servants would not be able to discharge their duties with dignity," the judge noted.
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Calling the act "abuse of power", the court held that "it is the demand of time to curb such tendency".
Rane, a son of former Union minister Narayan Rane, was among 30 people charged under various offences, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant, and criminal conspiracy. He was in Congress when the incident occurred.
All the accused, including Nitesh Rane, were acquitted of these offences, as the court found insufficient evidence to support most of these claims.
However, the court found Nitesh Rane guilty of an offence under section 504 (intentional insult meant to provoke a breach of public peace) and sentenced him to one month's jail.
Rane, then a Congress MLA, had called the Sub-Divisional Engineer of the National Highway Authority, Prakash Shedekar, to a bridge over the Gad river in Kankavli on July 4, 2019, for inspecting the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Highway.
According to the prosecution, Nitesh Rane and his followers, frustrated by the poor quality of the roadwork and waterlogging, confronted the engineer. They poured muddy water on Shedekar and forced him to walk through slush in public.
The court, after perusing the evidence on record, noted that the informant (victim) was holding a high post in the National Highway Authority.
"Despite that, he was made to walk through the muddy water in public. It would have certainly humiliated and insulted him," the court remarked.
The judge held that Rane compelling Shedekar to walk through the muddy water "was nothing but an intentional insult to the informant," and provocation which will cause him to break the public peace.
