Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
Talking to ‘The Hitavada’, Sheikh mourned the situation as he struggled to cope up with the disaster. “We haven’t received a single penny or support as help from any government agency. And now we are receiving notices not to resume our work,” he said.
The August 6 midnight fire at eight garages of Kachipura area has shattered lives of the garage owners. Jagdish Rathod, owner of Rathod Garage, is running the garage at Kachipura since 2001 but never saw a single fire incident in the last 20 years. The inferno gutted garage and mechanic tools apart from two vehicles of his customers.
Mushtaque Ahmed, owner of New Nagpur Garage, has managed to resume work at his garage after facing losses of more than Rs 3.5 lakh. The 65-year-old said that it was a difficult task to restart business after facing such huge losses following long lockdowns.
The garage owners feel something fishy about the fire incident. They claimed that some anti-socials deliberately set the backyard of the garages on fire. They also ruled possibility of short-circuit stating the power meters were installed at the front side while the back side of the garages had caught fire at around 2 am when all the shops were shut.
During the fire-fighting operation, an excavator was called by the NMC officials which razed all the shops made of tin sheds. The owners also questioned the use of excavators during the fire fighting operation.
The reason behind the devastating fire was not yet established by the police or fire department of NMC.
Chief Fire Officer of NMC Rajendra Uchake said that police had authority to investigate and ascertain the reason behind the fire.
Senior WPI Shubhangi Deshmukh of Bajaj Nagar police station said the cops had yet to come to any conclusion about actual reason behind the fire.
When asked about serving notices to the garage owners, NMC Assistant Commissioner Prakash Warade said that the notices were served after receiving complaints of some local residents.
“We have asked them to show their land ownership before restarting construction,” Warade said, adding that this was a precautionary measure so that such an incident would not occur in future.
Incidentally, the office of Unit No. 1 of the Crime Branch is located along the garage line.
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