Union Minister blames state officials for floods

Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Jitendra Singh stated "that the floods were the result of the carelessness and negligence of officers of the Punjab government". He was here to inspect the Madhopur barrage headworks.

The minister was accompanied by Punjab BJP working president Ashwani Sharma, Pathankot BJP president Suresh Sharma, former MLA Dinesh Singh Babbu, ex-Mayor Anil Vasudeva and media in-charge Pardeep Raina.

Jitendra Singh, after inspecting the Madhopur barrage, said the Punjab Government officials delayed the opening of the barrage gates. “Just to make somebody a scapegoat, the government suspended three low-level officials, while senior officers, who were the real decision-makers, should have been blamed for this inefficiency,” said the minister.

On August 27, one employee of the Water Resources Department, a chargeman, who had gone to open the gates, had lost his life after one of the gates crashed due to surge in the water. His body, which got entangled with the gate due to excessive silt, was found two days later.

The Ranjit Sagar dam had released a massive amount of water into the already swollen Ravi river, thus severely increasing the pressure on the Madhopur barrage.

“Officials of the Ranjit Sagar dam should be brought under scrutiny. With such a huge amount of water released into the river, there was every chance that heavily populated nearby places like Sujanpur and Pathankot could have been heavily flooded,” he said.

“There was a structural failure and administrative negligence by the state government which should be probed,” the minister added.

The minister said that in this era of technology, manual gates had become outdated. “I have asked the Deputy Commissioner (DC) to look into the feasibility of installing machine-driven gates,” he said.

Experts said the floods brought in a considerable amount of silt which had jammed several gates of the barrage, thus hindering the opening process.

There are 54 gates of the barrage. Officials say the collapse of the gates brought to the surface the aging infrastructure, administrative and technical lapses.

Earlier, the minister paid tributes at the statue of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the parent party of the BJP.