The government has held four officials of Mumbai Port Trust (MbPt) responsible for a chlorine gas leak on the port premises in July.
The government will take direct action two officers — the traffic manager and deputy conservator. Besides, the then assistant manager K R Shinde and safety officer M H Bahekar will be prosecuted by the port authorities on the basis of the shipping ministry’s instructions.
The ministry has also instructed Mumbai Port Trust authorities to file an FIR against the importer, Agro Gases, and the handling agent, James Mackintosh, for criminal negligence through ‘various acts of omission and commission’. Along with the list of accused, the shipping ministry, in its report sent to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), has also sent recommendations on handling hazardous wastes by the major ports in future.
In September, a three-member committee was formed to relook into the gas leak after the port authorities failed to fix responsibility on any person. The committee, in its recommendations for handling hazardous substances, has recommended that the provision of the Customs Act 1962 (Section 24 -2) that gives the importer a choice of refusing to take delivery of imported cargo needs to be repealed.
In the long term, the ports also have been told that all hazardous cargo would be handled during daylight hours only and if any such cargo is not cleared and lies in the port for seven days from landing, the ship agent has to re-ship the cargo back to the origin country within the next seven days.
Meanwhile, the government has asked the safety cell of MbPT to revise its departmental safety manuals and update them every year. The recommendations by the three-member panel have said, “The MbPt has to bear the loss caused by the destruction of hazardous cargo rather than its sale.”
There were about 105 unclaimed chlorine gas cylinders lying at the Hay Bandar warehouse of MbPT premises for 15 years. There is about 203 metric tonne of hazardous cargo lying at the Mumbai Port, which comprises about 200 consignments lying unclaimed by the importers.
