Mumbai, December 03: The city’s water woes today claimed a life and left several injured when police baton charged demonstrators protesting the cut in water supply to residential areas in front of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) headquarters.
Vishal Dholakia (43), one among the few hundred protesters, allegedly died of head injuries at the G T Hospital in south Mumbai, close to the police headquarters, though the authorities attributed his death to heart attack.
Additional Commissioner of Police R K Padmanabhan said Dholakia apparently had some medical condition and died of heart attack.
Superintendent of G T Hospital A V Kulkarni said Dholakia did not have any injury marks on his body.
Hundreds of people from the city and the suburbs had collected in front of BMC headquarters around noon under the banner of “Swabhiman”, an NGO run by Maharashtra minister Narayan Rane’s son Nitesh, to protest the 15 per cent cut introduced in the wake of poor rainfall during monsoon.
Waving red flags and shouting slogans against the BMC, the agitators pulled down the barricades in their bid to barge into the civic body’s headquarters.
“The crowd turned unruly and we used minimal of force to control them. They engaged in vandalism outside BMC office and could have gone out of control if allowed inside,” Padmanabhan said.
—Agencies