New Delhi: Following an incident where a billboard collapsed on a petrol pump in Mumbai’s eastern suburb of Ghatkopar in Pant Nagar district, resulting in 16 fatalities and over 70 injuries, the Mumbai Crime Branch Thursday arrested Bhavesh Bhinde, the director of Ego Media Pvt Ltd — the company that owned the billboard.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Lakhmi Gautam confirmed to ThePrint that Bhinde was arrested in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan and brought to Mumbai via Ahmedabad.
One of the four billboards operated by Ego Media fell at the Ghatkopar petrol pump in Chheda Nagar junction along the eastern expressway on 13 May following a massive dust storm. The National Disaster Response Force was deployed to extricate individuals trapped under the rubble.
Subsequently, Bhinde was booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 338 (negligence and hurting), 337 (endangering human life), and 34 (offence committed by more than one person with common intention).
ThePrint Thursday reported that Bhinde’s company was targeted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for at least 14 months, but he used loopholes in the municipal laws to mislead the BMC.
The land where Bhinde’s company had put up the hoardings, including the one that collapsed, belonged to the state government and had been allotted to the Maharashtra State Police Housing Corporation.
The Government Railway Police (GRP), which is responsible for the use of the land, had approved the erection of three hoardings in December 2021, while the approval for the fourth one was granted only in November 2022.
Bhinde’s company was previously booked on three occasions by the Mumbai Police under the provisions of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act after BMC employees alleged that the company felled and poisoned trees that were obstructing the view of their billboards.
Simultaneously, the BMC had also issued three notices to Ego Media Pvt Ltd and GRP demanding the removal of the billboards and addressing the environmental concerns raised.
The BMC served two notices, one on 2 May, directing the removal of the billboards over the complaints against the company. The last one of these was served on 13 May — the day of the collapse — in which the BMC sought Rs 6.13 crore as a licence fee from Ego Media and asked the company and the GRP to remove the hoardings within 10 days, failing which it had to take them down.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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