Eight Dead in Chapoli: The Road Had No Contract File

A Road With No Contract File

The road at Chapoli in Jhunjhunu district had no contract file. That finding came from the police, not an auditor.

Eight workers died on Monday when the hydraulic jack of a gravel mixer touched an overhead high-voltage line. Five more are in Udaipurwati Hospital.

The cement-concrete road was going in across three separate stretches with three separate labour teams, on land the Rajasthan Forest Department holds as protected, with no permission on record and the Model Code of Conduct live ahead of sarpanch polls.

Jhunjhunu SP Kavendra Sagar's preliminary account is that villagers raised donations among themselves. A public road asset, on forest land, financed by collection, delivered by an unidentified contractor, with no DPR, no expenditure record, no supervising engineer, no identified award decision.

The Forest Department outpost covering Kadamb Kund has reportedly been unstaffed for two months, according to local resident Subhash Kumawat. That silence removed the only authority positioned to stop the work.

The Post-Mortem the Project Never Had

Run the post-mortem as it should have been run before mobilisation:

- Scope: three stretches compressed into days, timed to an election deadline.
- Award: no procurement trail, therefore no eligibility check, no item-rate basis, no performance security, no award note.
- Supervision: nobody named.
- Safety: elevated plant working under live conductors without a de-energisation permit, a spotter or an earth-leakage check.
- Insurance: none implied.

That last line is the commercial core.

Where a contract exists, liability has a name, a bank guarantee, an insurer, a dispute forum. Here there is a donation list and a police file.

The proximate cause was a rolling mixer. What put eight men beneath a live conductor without a clearance survey is a delivery model operating outside every safety obligation the sector has codified.

Rajasthan runs a dense distribution network that is thinly mapped at village level. Plant working under it needs a survey, not a warning shout.

The Eight and the Record Ahead

The eight — Hariram Gurjar, Mangalchand Gurjar, Kaluram Gurjar, Pawan Gurjar, Vishnu Saini, Surendra Saini, Mukesh Saini, Nitesh Saini — were the entire safety system on that site.

Watch what the Forest Department and the panchayat record produce over the next fortnight. If the answer is 'no written proposal', then every donation-funded rural link road in Rajasthan is running the same exposure, uninsured and unsupervised.