This has fuelled speculations that NTPC was under pressure to keep the snag-hit unit number-6 working for the occasion.All India Power Engineers' Federation chairman Shailendra Dubey said some NTPC engineers did inform the federation about the tremendous pressure to keep the unit in a working state. As reported by TOI, NTPC engineers had detected the fault in the ash evacuation system over an hour before the blast and were working to fix it while keeping the unit working. But the pressure inside the furnace kept rising and eventually ripped off part of the boiler to let hot fumes and ash out," Dubey said. "In this case, workers were deployed to break ash clinkers manually without shutting down the unit completely. This is the first time that a UP minister has openly criticised NTPC management over the blast that left 33 dead.

Source: Times of India November 05, 2017 00:13 UTC