MARGAO
The Gakuved Federation staged a protest outside the Water Resources Department office at Rawanfond on Monday to condemn what the NGO termed as the illegal suspension of six WRD staff, belonging to the ST community, for the obscene shoot of actress Poonam Pandey at the Chapoli dam, Canacona, that went viral last week.
The Federation demanded that the WRD immediately revoke the suspension and mete out justice to the six employees, including five pump attendants and a supervisor.
Federation General Secretary Rupesh Velip told the media after handing over a memorandum to the WRD Executive engineer that the six employees were not at all in charge of the security in and around the Chapoli dam. The federation maintained that the six employees have been made scapegoats to save officials, who were responsible for the shoot.
He pointed out that the duty hours of the six pump attendants and the lone supervisor starts from 9.30 in the morning every day, and wondered what crime have the six committed for the video shoot that had taken place before they joined work.
“These six employees have been scapegoats just because they belong to the downtrodden community,” he said, while demanding that the government should have placed under suspension those who were in charge of issuing the permission.
The federation has warned that it will have no option but to knock on the doors of the judiciary to get justice for the six employees.
The WRD Executive Engineer later said that the WRD had not given any permission to shoot the video at the Chapoli dam, adding that the security at the dam is manned by an agency.
The engineer told the delegation of Gakuved delegation that the report of the inquiry ordered into the episode is expected to come in within a week’s time, adding that further action will depend on the findings of the inquiry.
