Bosses Of Firm That Repaired Gujarat Bridge Still Missing As Anger Grows

Three days after a century-old bridge collapsed in Gujarat’s Morbi, killing 135 people, the owners of the company blamed for poor renovation work remain missing.

The Oreva company, a watchmaker, bagged a 15-year contract to maintain the bridge in March and reopened it after repairs seven months later – before schedule. The Morbi municipal body allegedly awarded the contract to Oreva without a bidding process.

Questions have been raised by the survivors of the tragedy and the opposition about the police FIR not naming either the top bosses of Oreva or the civic officials who signed the contract despite glaring gaps.

Oreva’s Managing Director Jaysukhbhai Patel, who had publicly claimed that the renovated bridge will hold up for at least eight to ten years, has not been seen since the tragedy, locals told NDTV. The Oreva company’s farmhouse in Ahmedabad is locked and abandoned, with not even a security guard in sight.

Mr Patel had signed the contract with the Morbi municipal corporation and Ajanta Manufacturing Limited, which is part of Oreva, better known as a clockmaker. The agreement did not even mention any requirement of a fitness certificate before the bridge was opened to the public.

The contractors who carried out the bridge repairs were not qualified for such work, the prosecution told a court on Tuesday.

“Despite that, these contractors were given repair work of the bridge in 2007 and then in 2022,” the prosecutor said.

The floor of the bridge was replaced but its old cables were not. The cables could not take the weight of the new flooring and snapped, said the prosecution, citing a forensic report. The weight of the bridge had increased due to four-layered aluminium sheets used in the flooring and the cables couldn’t support it.

Opposition parties and locals have accused the state government of sparing the big fish and making scapegoats out of security guards, ticket sellers and lower level employees of Oreva.

Two managers of the Oreva Group and two sub-contractors who had repaired the bridge have been sent to police custody till Saturday. Five other arrested men, including security guards and ticket booking clerks, are in judicial custody.

The police have said the agency failed to carry out a quality check before opening the bridge to the public on October 26 – the day the Gujarati New Year was celebrated – displaying severe carelessness.