Mumbai: K* has resigned himself to a life of persistent nightmares. 

A survivor of one of India’s deadliest offshore disasters, K struggles to forget  the raging winds of Cyclone Tauktae on 17 May 2021, the memory of jumping from a sinking ship into the Arabian Sea, being tossed around by waves 15 metres high, and staying afloat in freezing waters for 26 hours, dead bodies around him.

Two vessels working for the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), India’s largest public sector oil major and also the world’s 14th largest energy company,  capsized off the coast of Mumbai when Cyclone Tauktae hit, killing 86 of the 274 men on board.  

With a net profit of Rs 40,526 crore ($ 484 million) in 2023-24 and India’s fourth-largest company, ONGC is a maharatna public-sector undertaking (PSU), a status of prestige given to select PSUs based on performance and financials.  

Two official inquiries were instituted by the union ministry of petroleum and natural gas. They found that the incident of May 2021 had an “overwhelming human dimension”; it was caused by “actions or inactions” traceable to an individual or a group; it was triggered by “commercial” decision-making and “unmitigated” safety lapses on the part of ONGC and the companies it had subcontracted for its offshore projects. 

Tauktae, one of the strongest tropical cyclones to hit the western coast of India, travelled northwards from Kerala to Gujarat between 14 May and 18 May 2021, at wind speeds of 180-210 km per hour. The vessels that capsized were directly in the cyclone’s path.

One inquiry, by a committee of three senior bureaucrats immediately after the incident, established the cause of the tragedy as the failure to evacuate  vessels near ONGC’s offshore fields despite numerous weather forecasts about the severity of the oncoming storm. 

This committee’s report said the decision to keep these vessels in the oil fields was “driven predominantly by commercial considerations rather than concern for the safety of the workforce”. 

The second inquiry, conducted by the parliamentary standing committee on petroleum and natural gas, headed by parliamentarian Ramesh Bidhuri, said in its April 2022 report that the union government should conduct a thorough investigation “about the responsibility of ONGC officials at various levels” and  act against those found to have been negligent. 

Two years since the standing committee report was tabled and three years since the tragedy, the union government has taken no action to hold ONGC or its partner companies accountable for the death of 86.

With its many offshore operations, including India’s largest oil field at Mumbai High, located approximately 170 km west of Mumbai, ONGC is also a major presence in the country’s marine sector. 

Retired mariner Captain Naveen Singhal, an international offshore consultant, said an independent judicial inquiry into the incident was essential. 

“The purpose of conducting an investigation is to be able to arrive at the root cause,” said Singhal, “So that appropriate action can be taken to prevent the recurrence or repetition of a similar accident in future.”

2 Capsized Vessels & A Blame Game 

Like many of the workers who died that day when the vessels capsized in the Arabian Sea, K was a small cog in a giant wheel of operations. 

ONGC operates three large oil and gas fields in the Arabian Sea, each housing multiple refineries, drilling platforms and floating rigs. A large portion of the work in these offshore facilities is carried out by external companies contracted by ONGC.

K was part of a project for maintenance and repair of a drilling platform in Heera Field, located around 70 km off the coast of Mumbai. 

The project was contracted in 2016 to Afcons Infrastructure, a construction company under the Shapoorji Pallonji conglomerate. Afcons then subcontracted a variety of other third party companies—shipping firms to provide vessels, seafarer agencies, catering companies and manpower agencies to supply technical workers like K, who was a welder. 

The two vessels that capsized were both “chartered”, or hired, by Afcons: barge Papaa-305, owned by shipping company Durmast Enterprises, and tugboat Varapradha, owned by Glory Ship Management. 

Papaa-305, with 261 men on board, was an accommodation barge, a 96-metre long flat-bottomed vessel meant to serve as a floating hostel for workers who would spend six or seven months at sea. Accommodation barges have no self-propulsion mechanism; they are entirely dependent on an accompanying tugboat to be towed around and anchored. 

Varapradha was one such tugboat. It was a smaller vessel with just 13 mariners on board, chartered to accompany a different barge called Gal Constructor.   

When ONGC first received weather warnings about Cyclone Tauktae on 13 May 2021, it claimed to have advised all 99 vessels operating in its oil fields to stop work and move to safe locations. 

The responsibility of following this advice and choosing safe locations, according to ONGC, lay with the companies in charge of the vessels. In the aftermath of the incident, it blamed Afcons and the captains of the two capsized vessels for not taking the right call.

Afcons, meanwhile, claimed that decision-making about a vessel’s safety was ultimately the responsibility of its captain. The captains of both Papaa-305 and Varapradha died in the disaster. 

In their reports, the high-level committee of bureaucrats and the parliamentary standing committee both held the barge’s captain partly responsible for underestimating the risk, but both committees emphasised that the 86 deaths were a result of several systemic errors and negligence on the part of ONGC. 

No Action To Fix Accountability

The findings of the two inquiry committees pointed to the absence of marine experts at ONGC and to fraudulent safety training certificates, among other things. Yet, three years since the tragedy, the Union government has not announced any further investigation nor taken any disciplinary action against officials of the PSU. 

The only action it took was short-lived. Upon the constitution of the high-level inquiry committee, the petroleum ministry temporarily suspended five senior officers of ONGC, including three executive directors. After the committee’s inquiry, however, all five officers were reinstated. 

In December 2022, the parliamentary standing committee asked the ministry to share the reasons for reinstating these suspended officers, but did not get a response. 

The committee reiterated to Parliament in December 2022 that an impartial probe was required to ensure ONGC’s accountability. This, too, was ignored. 

The high-level committee’s report was never released in the public domain, even though it was submitted to the petroleum ministry in December 2021. Article 14 was able to access it through the Forward Seamen’s Union of India, which got a copy of the report in September 2022 after filing multiple Right To Information queries with the ministry.  

Article 14 sent detailed questions to the petroleum ministry, including to minister Hardeep Singh Puri, secretary Pankaj Jain and joint secretary for refineries, Sujata Sharma, about action that the ministry may or may not have taken to implement each of the standing committee’s recommendations. They did not respond to the questions. 

Article 14 also sent detailed questions to the corporate communications teams of ONGC and Afcons Infrastructure on July 16. 

In three phone calls between July 17 and 23, ONGC’s communications executive, Satyaki Pal, asked for the questions to be re-sent and requested time for the company’s concerned officers to respond. However, Pal was unable to specify how much time ONGC needed to respond, and the questions unanswered as of the date of publishing. Afcons, meanwhile, did not respond to multiple phone calls or to the email questions.

Ramesh Bidhuri, the Bharatiya Janata Party MP who led the standing committee, said he could not comment on the government’s response to the committee’s report. “We tabled the report and it was publicised, but after that it is not right to keep commenting on it,” said Bidhuri. He said a parliamentary standing committee could only make recommendations. “Whether or not to act on them is in the government’s hands.” 

For families of the 86 victims and for 188 survivors, the lack of action to fix responsibility for the tragedy has added to their trauma.    

“These people were responsible for ruining so many families, but they have not faced any consequences,” said K, who quit the offshore industry after the incident and now has a job at a logistics firm in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. “It has been three years and we are still waiting for justice.” 

Cost-Cutting Decisions Preceded Tragedy

A common finding in both committees’ reports was that ONGC and Afcons did not take the Indian Meteorological Department’s cyclone forecasts seriously. 

On the morning of 14 May 2021, the deck officer of Papaa-305 sent an official email to at least seven ONGC officials besides others, seeking instructions “urgently” on the action to be taken in light of the extreme weather forecasts. The barge was stationed right next to one of Heera Field’s platforms, and it would need time to pull out its anchors and move to a safer location. 

This email received no response.  According to the standing committee’s report, ONGC’s project team saw the email a whole day later, on the morning of 15 May. 

During this time, the barge’s captain first planned to evacuate all the way to Mumbai, then decided to move to the outer anchorage area (safe zone just outside of a harbour) of the oil field instead. 

By the evening of 14 May, the plans changed again. According to the high-level committee report, a meeting was held between Papaa-305’s master, chief engineer, the Afcons representative on the barge and the Afcons base office. A decision was made to move the barge just 175 metres away from the platform. 

This was one of the decisions that the high-level committee called out as being “driven by commercial considerations”. 

The maintenance project that Afcons was carrying out in Heera Field was scheduled to be completed on 20 May 2021—less than a week from then. 

To avoid the costs of evacuating vessels to Mumbai and transporting them back to the field for just a few days of remaining work, Afcons made Papaa-305 stay. The committee said Afcons “unsuccessfully tried to coerce some other barge masters [captains] to stay put in the field, but the masters of those barges decided otherwise”.

One of the captains who reportedly resisted pressure from Afcons was Agnelo Rebello of barge Gal Constructor, which was stationed in South Field with 137 men on board. Rebello was reported to have said he wanted to leave for Mumbai as soon as he received forecasts about the cyclone on 13 May 2021, but Afcons did not provide his barge with its designated tugboat, Varapradha, until the night of 14 May. 

By the time the barge lifted anchor from the oil field and finished the 160-km journey towards the port with Varapradha, it was already late on 16 May. 

Both vessels attempted to anchor themselves some distance from the port, but got caught up in the cyclone. Gal Constructor drifted for nearly three days, with no food or water for its men, and finally ended up on the rocky coast of Palghar district, north of Mumbai. 

All 137 men were then airlifted to safety. Varapradha, on the other hand, could not withstand the waves, and capsized on the evening of 17 May. 

Only one of its two inflatable life rafts proved to be functional. Eleven of its 13 crew members perished. 

For Papaa-305, the decision to move merely 175 metres from the ONGC platform proved to be fatal. As the cyclone hit the region in full force, the barge rocked violently. One by one, all of its eight anchors snapped, and on the morning of 17 May, the 8,900-tonne barge collided with the platform. The collision caused seawater to enter the barge’s engine room, where K and his colleagues were desperately trying to pump it out. 

As Papaa-305 began to tilt and sink, half of its 36 life rafts became inaccessible to the 261 men on board. Another nine rafts had been damaged by the cyclone, and the men soon discovered that the remaining few life rafts were faulty—they did not inflate the way they were supposed to. “A lot of men died because of these faulty life rafts,” said K, who ended up jumping into the sea with just his life jacket on. 

Only 188 of the men on Papaa-305 survived—they were rescued by the Indian Navy after a difficult 36-hour operation. 

Missing Maritime Expertise

Whatever decisions Afcons and the barge’s captain may have taken, the standing committee’s report maintained that ONGC was in charge of overseeing them all. In fact, an official from the petroleum ministry told the committee that “in case of storms or other risky situations, it is ONGC that is responsible for ensuring that ships are sent to a safe place”. 

Yet, during their inquiries, both committees discovered that ONGC was handicapped in its ability to fulfil this responsibility. 

As a large public sector company, ONGC has different directors for a variety of departments—offshore operations, onshore operations, technology, human resources and so on. All decisions and events linked to Cyclone Tauktae should have been overseen by the director of offshore operations, a person meant to serve as ONGC’s in-house expert on maritime issues. As it turned out, however, that post had been vacant since 1 May 2021. 

Additionally, ONGC did not ensure the presence of a maritime expert on the maintenance project that Afcons was leading at the time of the cyclone.

When Afcons was given the contract in 2016, it was part of a consortium of four companies, each responsible for a different aspect of the work. According to details provided by the high-level committee, two of the companies—Triune Energy Services and Nauvata Engineering—had already completed the engineering services they had been contracted to provide. 

The third company, Halani International Ltd, had a crucial role: it was in charge of providing the marine spread (vessels and crew) and maritime expertise for the project. In January 2019, Halani International left the consortium after a legal dispute. 

Instead of replacing Halani with another maritime expert, ONGC allowed Afcons—an infrastructure company—to take complete charge of all aspects of the project, even though it had no maritime handling capability. For instance, the high-level committee pointed out that the company’s emergency response plan for Papaa-305 was a “one-page document with no details of emergency scenarios and actions to be taken” in such an eventuality.

“Having a maritime expert on the consortium was part of the tender for the project, so ONGC should not have let the project run after Halani left,” said Manoj Yadav, general secretary of the Forward Seamen’s Union of India, a mariners’ union. “They neglected this major safety concern.” 

As a result, Yadav said, there was no qualified person who could coordinate with the barge master during the cyclone or give advice about the best way to save people. 

Expired Safety Licence, Old Life Rafts  

Another major safety lapse that contributed to the Cyclone Tauktae disaster was the poor condition of the vessels and life rafts. 

According to the high-level committee’s report, ONGC prescribes very specific standards for the vessels that it owns or directly charters. It mandates, for instance, that these vessels must be less than 21 years old, and that life rafts must be replaced every 10 years. 

However, it does not impose these same standards on vessels hired by contractor companies such as Afcons. The specifications given to these contracted companies lacked “essential details about vintage, stability, adverse weather capabilities, safety, etc,” said the committee report. 

Tugboat Varapradha was a 38-year-old vessel whose safety licence issued by the central government’s Directorate General of Shipping had expired on 15 May 2021, two days before the cyclone hit. The high-level committee pointed out that the tugboat flooded and capsized easily during the cyclone because many of its parts were not water-tight. 

Papaa-305, meanwhile, had serious problems with its life-saving equipment. The committee found that nearly all of its 36 life rafts were over 10 years old, and 13 of them were 17 years old. 

Since ONGC typically hires third-party agencies to inspect the seaworthiness of vessels and equipment deployed by partner companies, the standing committee recommended that the government take strict action against these inspection agencies. It also urged the petroleum ministry to set up an in-house team of vessel and safety inspectors within ONGC. 

Fake Certificates For Untrained Workers  

One of the most damning findings of the high-level committee and standing committee inquiries was that many of the men on Papaa-305—the technical workers who were not trained seafarers—had been given fake sea survival training certificates. 

While the marine crew of any vessel is skilled in survival at sea, technical workers like K may take up offshore jobs only after completing short safety training courses. These cover skills such as learning how to inflate life rafts, swimming in the open sea, jumping from a helicopter or staying alive in freezing waters. These courses must be done from maritime training institutes licensed by the Directorate General of Shipping. 

The high-level committee found that 60 men on Papaa-305 did not have training certificates at all, and another 164 men had received training through courses or institutes lacking accreditation from the Directorate General of Shipping. 

K said he did not receive any training at all. “When I got the job, my agency just gave me a certificate from some institute—I didn’t even know what it was for,” said K. “They never actually made me attend any course or training.”

The standing committee’s report recommended that the government carry out strict verification of the survival-at-sea institutes and training certificates. 

Insomnia, Nightmares For Survivors 

A public interest litigation filed in the Bombay High Court in September 2021 demanded an independent judicial inquiry into the disaster. The case is still ongoing.

According to retired captain Naveen Singhal, who filed the PIL along with the Forward Seamen’s Union of India, such an investigation is needed for the larger good of India’s growing maritime sector. 

Singhal said the present government has prioritised the marine industry. “However, to be recognised globally among the top international maritime powers, it is imperative that international conventions, regulations and best practices are followed as defined by the United Nations’ maritime wing, the International Maritime Organization,” said Singhal.

Meanwhile, with the third anniversary of the ONGC disaster already behind them, survivors like K are starting to lose hope about ever seeing justice. 

For nearly a year after the incident, K hid away in his village in Uttar Pradesh, coping with trauma and insomnia. “In my dreams, I would see bodies of my colleagues without hands, without faces, some with crabs coming out of them,” he said. “It took me months to get out and start looking for a job again.” 

Now, with a stable job in Noida and determined to never set foot in Mumbai again, K wants to move on but sometimes feels a deep anger. 

“It seems like no one wants to take any action against these companies at all, while I will always have to live with trauma because of them.” 

(Aarefa Johari is an award-winning independent journalist writing on gender, labour, human rights, culture and more.) 

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