IANS/Mumbai

The sections which have burnt down had important information pertaining to RTI queries. Now, the government will have an easy escape route
The toll in the major fire that swept the Maharashtra state secretariat here climbed to five with two more bodies recovered from the sixth floor yesterday afternoon, an official said.
The bodies of two people, charred beyond recognition, were found outside the Chief Minister’s Office on the sixth floor of the Mantralaya, said a city disaster control official.
While two bodies were recovered late Thursday evening, another was found yesterday morning from the building, the official said.
The  blaze started around 2.40pm on Thursday in room number 411 on the fourth floor and quickly spread, engulfing the top three floors of the six-storeyed Mantralaya building, the landmark in the heart of south Mumbai.
The rescue teams, comprising of personnel drawn from the fire brigade and police, an Indian Navy team and Force One commandoes and 41 fire tenders from Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, and other agencies, managed to evacuate and save 65 people trapped on the upper floors.
The situation is “under control” and the flames have been doused. Now the cooling operations are under way, a fire brigade official said.
Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan has ordered an inquiry by the Crime Branch to ascertain whether it was an accident, negligence or sabotage.
According to Mantralaya staffers’ union leader R G Karnik, some 3,000 employees work in the building. It gets an equal number of visitors every day.
Meanwhile, a prominent Right to Information activist, alleging negligence and non-implementation of norms, yesterday urged the Mumbai police to investigate a sabotage angle to Thursday’s Mantralaya fire which claimed five lives.
In a letter to the head of Marine Drive police station and Mumbai police commissioner Arup Patnaik yesterday, Athak Seva Sangh chairman and RTI activist Anil Galgali demanded that the police lodge cases against officials of the public works department and general administrative department for negligence of fire safety audit norms which resulted in the major fire.
“The fire safety audit was done in 2008 and a report was submitted to the state government on September 29, 2008. It had listed 32 risks, including civil and electrical defects, encroachment due to parking of vehicles in the mandatory open spaces around the building, files and old records strewn on the floors, storage of scrap material on all floors, and cylinder used for cooking on mezzanine fifth and sixth floors,” Galgali said.
Alleging that the seventh floor constructed at the Mantralaya was illegal, Galgali said a full-scale probe would reveal the entire truth in the matter and the causes leading to the fire, which has paralysed the state administration.
He said the state government did not heed the fire brigade department’s warning in 2008, and also ignored a reminder in 2010 after a fire gutted a large part of the Goyal Shopping Centre in Borivli, north-west Mumbai.
“Moreover, the sections which have burnt down had important information pertaining to RTI queries made by many activists. Now, the government will have an easy escape route by saying all official records are lost in the fire,” Galgali contended.