Pace of Raman govt: after 14 months only a cabinet nod

     Raipur, October 2, 2008: Even after 14 months of the accident of the Chhattisgarh government helicopter that killed four of its employees, the state government had only took a cabinet decision on rehabilitation of the affected families.

     The cabinet, chaired by the Chief Minister Dr Raman Singh recently decided only to give approval for the appointment of the dependent of killed engineer Amitabh Soni in the State Electricity Department.

     The cabinet approved the appointment of Deepa Soni, the widow of the flight engineer, as an Assistant grade-3 in the office of Chief Electricity Inspector, officials said today.

     The sophisticated state government’s Eurocopter EC135 went missing 35 minutes after its take off from Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal on July 14 last year with two senior pilots and two technical staff and the state government took five days to locate its derbies.

       The Raman administration was attacked from all sides for its alleged callous attitude in searching the missing copter as it was laying just two km from its Rajnandgaon district border inside the Madhya Pradesh but the administration failed to locate that for five days.

    Finally a villager informed the Balaghat district police and subsequently the decomposed bodies of two pilots Capt A S Sidhu and Capt Vikram Savekar and Engineer Amitabh Soni and Technician Manish Badania were found along with the wreckage.

     The failure of Chhattisgarh government to find out its own aviation people along with the modern state-owned helicopter had also exposed the preparedness that time of the state government to meet any crisis, several officials admitted.