A 23-year-old man identified as Shadab needed surgery at Wockhardt Hospital in Mira Road after a cement block fell on his head from the under-construction Metro Line 9 bridge at Kashimira on Sunday evening, September 20. He had stopped outside a bar on the stretch to take a phone call. According to the Free Press Journal, he lay on the road for close to an hour, hidden from passers-by by parked heavy vehicles, before someone took him to hospital in an autorickshaw. Swarajya reported the same account and named J Kumar Infraprojects as the Metro 9 contractor.
The third serious incident in ten days
Kashimira came two days after a death on the other side of the region. On September 18, an iron barricade at a Metro 4 site on LBS Road in Vikhroli West fell onto the motorcycle of Wasi Haider Rizvi, a 54-year-old plumber from Ghatkopar. Doctors at Rajawadi Hospital declared him dead about an hour later. Parksite police registered a negligence case under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and MMRDA fined contractor Godrej & Boyce Rs 2 crore and ordered an inquiry under a former Commissioner of Railway Safety, LatestLY reported. MMRDA’s own preliminary view, per the same report, was that the bikers may have hit the barricade. Rizvi’s family says the barricade was never secured.
Six days before that, on September 12, a staging structure collapsed at the Metro 4 site near Bhakti Park in Wadala and killed two workers. Police booked a sub-contractor for negligence, and MMRDA fined contractor RInfra-Astaldi JV and the general consultant a combined Rs 6 crore, the Free Press Journal reported. Counting the Mulund parapet collapse in February, Metro 4 work has now killed four people this year.
Rs 20.5 crore in fines since mid-August
Mira-Bhayandar residents have seen this pattern on Line 9 before. On August 17, a crane basket knocked granite stones off the foot-over-bridge area at the Medetiya Nagar station site on the Western Express Highway. Nobody was hurt, but the stones punctured tyres of passing vehicles. MMRDA fined J Kumar Rs 10 crore, finishing contractor N.A. Gajanan Construction Rs 1.5 crore and the general consultant Rs 1 crore, as FPJ and PropNewsTime reported. We covered that penalty at the time, along with the Kurla crane collapse a few days later.
Add up the three penalties since mid-August (Rs 12.5 crore, Rs 6 crore and Rs 2 crore) and MMRDA has levied about Rs 20.5 crore on Metro contractors and consultants in roughly five weeks. The authority told agencies in August to follow safety protocols strictly. A month later, a block came off the same line. By Tuesday morning, none of the reports we checked mentioned a penalty over the Kashimira incident.
A fine lands on a contractor after something has fallen. Residents walking under a viaduct still cannot tell which spans carry live overhead work that evening, or when anyone last checked the netting. None of the coverage of these four incidents cites any site-wise inspection data from MMRDA for Line 9 or Line 4.
What it means if you live or work along the route
- Treat the space under an unfinished span as a work zone. The Kashimira victim was standing at the roadside, not inside the barricades. Parking, hawking and waiting for rides directly under open girders put you in the drop zone.
- Parked trucks and buses hide injured people. Shadab lay unnoticed for close to an hour because parked heavy vehicles blocked the view. If you see debris fall near a pillar, check the roadside before walking on.
- Victims have a legal route. In Vikhroli, the family’s complaint led to an FIR naming the project director, manager, site supervisor and contractor. Filing a police complaint puts the incident on record whatever the agency’s own inquiry finds.
What to watch
The inquiry into the Vikhroli death is the first test of whether MMRDA will go beyond fines. Its findings on barricade anchoring and supervision will apply to every Metro corridor in the region. On Line 9, watch whether MMRDA fines anyone over Kashimira at all, and whether police record Shadab’s account once he can give it. Overhead work on the Kashimira bridge is still under way, so the risk to people below has not gone anywhere.
Sources: Free Press Journal, Swarajya, LatestLY, Free Press Journal (Vikhroli), PropNewsTime
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.