MOMENTS BEFORE

An official announcement seems to have triggered a rush for boats out of the Sabbalpur Diara, resulting in the tragedy on the Ganga that claimed 24 lives on Saturday .

The time was 3pm, and the kite festival was on in full swing at the diara across the river from Gandhi Ghat in Patna. Thousands had assembled at an amusement park/fair set up there, apart from the state government's kite festival for Makar Sankranti.

At this juncture, tourism department officials announced people should leave by 4pm. The announcement apparently made people realise they had just an hour to cross the Ganga to return to Patna and a rush for private boats ensued.

The tourism department had deployed just two diesel-run cruise boats to ferry people for free. The makeshift bamboo jetty erected on the diara side was also damaged because of overloading. It added to the scramble for private boats.

Eyewitnesses said the announcement on the public address system led to panic after people realised that there were not enough boats. As evening approached, the sense of dread increased.

"People started forcibly boarding any boat they could see. In the process, they went around a kilometre down from the kite festival venue and boarded a boat used for ferrying vegetables and milk from the diara area. The boatman's pleas not to board it fell on deaf ears," disaster management department joint secretary Anirudh Kumar told The Telegraph.

"At least 50 people must have boarded the boat meant for carrying 20 to 25 persons. As the overloaded boat proceeded, water started seeping in. They started jumping and moving from one side to another, which turned it turtle. The incident occurred between 5.30 and 5.45pm. There was only one boat," Anirudh added.

National Disaster Response Force commandant Vijay Sinha, who deployed three teams consisting of around 150 people, said the boat which was dragged out from the riverbed had no hole, and it seemed that water flowed inside it due to the overloading.

Moreover, the private boats do not have any life-saving equipment like life jackets, lifebuoys and inflatable tubes. Owners of such boats need register with the transport department, but only a handful of them do so.

Only owners of boats engaged in transporting sand, stone chips and other commercial items register. A majority of them are unregistered and used for ferrying people, cattle, milk, vegetables from the diara area.

"They don't even bother to register," said a transport official.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar held a high-level meeting to review the mishap.

"The chief minister was depressed and agitated over the incident and wanted to know why set principles like compulsory registration of boats were not followed and facilities were not arranged for people, especially when Bihar successfully organised two back-to-back events - the Prakash Utsav and the Kalchakra puja. He also asked whether there were deficiencies in micro-level planning for the kite festival which has become popular among the people of Patna," a senior IAS officer told The Telegraph.

A source close to Nitish said: "Nitish enquired about the river police station at Fatuha in the vicinity of Patna to keep a tab on the river and plying of boats, but was shocked to find that the police station inaugurated with much fanfare five years ago was not functional."

Other reasons

• Inadequate number of police personnel at fest venue due to which crowd control became ineffective

• Senior officials from the organising side left the venue by afternoon and left the management to junior officials

• Rowdy behaviour by a large section of college students who did not stop boarding the boats despite being warned by boatmen

• Eyewitnesses said the motor of the ill-fated boat failed and it stopped after travelling around 25m from the bank. It helped water gush inside

• River patrolling was not being done nor were the boats escorted by the State Disaster Response Force which was deployed for the kite fest