MARGAO: Shoddy investigations due to which the prosecution had to rely on conjectures and surmises resulted in 11 of the accused in the infamous Ruby Residency collapse case being discharged of serious offences, including culpable homicide, dishonesty, cheating and criminal conspiracy.
On January 4, 2014, a four-storeyed building under construction at Chawdi Canacona collapsed at 2.30 pm when around 100 labourers were working on the building. While 31 labourers died, around 50 were injured and the rescue operations went on for nearly a week.
The State filed a case against 11 people, of which nine were different government officials while two were owners or builders of the project and one was the contractor. Incidentally, the contractor who was present when the building collapsed disappeared, instead of helping in the rescue operations, and was absconding for nearly a year.
While Canacona Police registered the case initially, it was subsequently handed over to Crime Branch. The charge sheet mentioned that various licences and permits were granted to the project without following procedures, as even the occupancy certificate was issued without carrying out a site inspection.
However, police failed to establish that the licences or permits were issued for favours granted. In fact Sessions Judge B P Deshpande in his judgment observed, “Just because files were cleared expeditiously it cannot be labelled a conspiracy as the prosecution failed to bring on record to even faintly suggest that there was any illegal demand of gratification or favour.”
The judge while terming the prosecution’s claim of a criminal conspiracy as based “only on conjectures and surmises” pointed out that there was no material to even suggest that a demand was made for reward or pecuniary advantages by any of the government servants.
The charge sheet relied on a report by an expert team of Goa Engineering College, which inspected the site and concluded that the collapse was due to the fact that building was constructed on earth fill that had not stablised and was also due to faulty construction using substandard material.
However, the investigating officer failed to establish that the drawings and suggestions given by the RCC consultant were not followed nor did they bring any material on record to prove that substandard material was being used to reduce the cost of construction even though a panchanama report did mention that murass was found in the concrete used.
Even as the Accused No. 1 Prakash Bandodkar, the then Town Planner at Canacona, argued that he had cleared three separate files of constructions less than 2000 square metres that he was empowered to clear, the police failed to establish that the builders were asked to prepare three separate files so that they could be approved at Canacona without being sent to the TCP.
Besides, the prosecution totally failed to establish their claim that there was a criminal conspiracy between the government servants and the builder along with the contractor as there was no evidence produced whatsoever to prove that there was a “meeting of the minds” between them that the building would collapse resulting in death of people.
In short, the investigation failed to prove beyond doubt that the construction was done on land unsuitable for a tall building namely an earth fill site, the RCC consultants suggestions were not followed and sub-standard material was used that resulted in the building collapsing killing 31 people.
