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”.



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