2 days after factory blast, Harda gets new collector, district police chief

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government on Thursday appointed IAS officer Aditya Singh as new collector of Harda and IPS officer Abhinav Choukse as Superintendent of Police, a day after transferring the incumbents in the wake of an explosion at a firecrackers factory that killed a dozen people in the district.

Their appointment orders were issued in the evening.

Singh is a 2014-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, while Choukse joined the Indian Police Service in 2018. The state government had on Wednesday transferred Harda district collector Rishi Garg and SP Sanjeev Kanchan.

On Thursday, the General Administration Department (GAD) issued an order appointing Singh as new collector of Harda district in place of Garg, who has been posted as a deputy secretary in the state secretariat at Bhopal. In a separate order, the state home department appointed Choukse as Harda SP in place of Kanchan.

Kanchan has been moved to the state police headquarters in Bhopal as Assistant Inspector General (AIG).

An explosion ripped through the fireworks factory located in the Bairagarh locality on the outskirts of Harda town, around 150km from state capital Bhopal, and caused a massive blaze on Tuesday morning.

Eleven people were killed the same day, while the body of an unidentified woman was found in a house adjoining the blast site on Thursday.