Kolkata, Sep 2 (SocialNews.XYZ) With the two successive hotel fire incidents in West Bengal last month killing a total of 18 persons, nine in each case, the state Fire services on Wednesday had announced major reshuffle within the department.
Of the two hotel fires, one was at Tarapith in Birbhum district and the other was at Mirza Ghalib Street in Kolkata.
The state Fire Services department had announced the transfers of a total of 17 Divisional Fire Officers (DFOs).
The 17 transferred DFOs include Subhankar Ghosh, who was till date the DFO South Kolkata Division, under whose jurisdiction the hotel at Mirza Ghalib Street came.
Ghosh had been replaced by Nihar Ranjan Roy, the erstwhile DFO of North 24 Parganas district.
The current DFO of Birbhum Division of the state Fire Services department, Arindam Debnath, under whose jurisdiction the Tarapith Hotel came, had been transferred as the DFO of Bankura Division.
The erstwhile Bankura Division, Shyam Sundar Dey had replaced Debnath as the Birbhum Division DFO.
Recently, a hotel fire broke out in the areas under both South Kolkata and Birbhum divisions of the state fire services department.
A fire broke out in a hotel in Mirza Ghalib Street area of New Market last month. A total of nine people, among which Bangladeshi citizens were also those who were killed.
A couple of days before that, a similar fire broke out at a Hotel at Tarapith in Birbhum district, which also took a toll of nine lives.
In both cases, gross negligence in the fire safety norms were detected by the state fire services department.
In the backdrop of these two mishaps, these large-scale transfers of the DFOs, especially those at South Kolkata and Birbhum divisions appeared quite significant.
The state government, however, described such transfers as routine ones.
Amid two successive hotel fire events at Tarapith and Mirza Ghalib Street, the state government has started the exercise of reviewing and correcting the internal flaws in the chain of granting different licenses for hotels, lodges and guesthouses in the state.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government had decided to tighten norms for granting of two crucial permissions namely "fire safety certificates" and "fire licenses".
Source: IANS
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