Nagpur: Revenue minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule, who is also Amravati’s guardian minister, on Tuesday said the final probe report into the Aug 24 fire at Amravati’s District Women’s Hospital, which killed three newborns in its Special Newborn Care Unit, was now expected by Wednesday. The senior cabinet minister did not rule out a case of culpable homicide once responsibility was fixed.“The incident is serious, beyond what can be tolerated. We will take appropriate action, and if it comes to a situation where a case of culpable homicide needs to be registered, we will not step back. But we will not let the guilty go,” said Bawankule, a day after personally inspecting the hospital.The fire broke out in an SNCU wing housing eight newborns. Three died of smoke inhalation while 36 other infants were shifted to private hospitals. Amravati civic officials have said the hospital’s fire audit had lapsed just before the blaze despite repeated warnings, and its electrical audit was also overdue, with the civic fire chief saying he personally believed a short circuit, not a ventilator blast as initially suspected, was the more likely cause.On day of the fire, Bawankule had ordered a separate Public Works Department probe into the audit lapse, and rejected a Shiv Sena UBT claim that the hospital was denied 9 crore in funding, saying 2.73 crore was released in 2024-25 and over 3 crore in 2025-26 for fire-safety works, and that no fresh proposal had been submitted by the civil surgeon this year. He also directed officials to redesign the hospital with world-class facilities.Adding to the pressure, BJP Mahila Morcha president Chitra Wagh has demanded a police probe into conflicting claims by the civil surgeon and PWD officials over when the fire audit was actually conducted, questioning a PWD claim that a junior clerk had certified the audit of the 400-bed hospital. “Either the civil surgeon is telling the truth or the PWD engineer is. The facts must come out through a police investigation,” she said.
