Police and fire services department on Wednesday allowed resumption of offices on the first three floors of the 14-storied Eastern Railway’s New Koilaghat building on Strand Road, following request from the railway authorities.

A fire razed the 12th and the 13th floors of the building on Monday night causing nine deaths.

Railway officials said the second floor of the building has servers that are used by six zonal railways for their online and offline ticket reservations. The third floor houses the office of the Railway Protection Force (RPF), one of whose constables — 36-year-old Sanjay Sahani — died in the blaze.

On Wednesday, power connection was resumed across the three floors and employees were allowed in after verification by a police team, which ringed the building since Monday night. The floors above remained dark without power and even elevators were not allowed to move.

“The all-important server is fully functional now after power was restored. We are trying to access other floors also but only after clearance from the investigating agency,” said Kamal Deo Das, the chief public relations officer of the Eastern Railway. “We don’t want to interfere with the investigation by the state agencies in any way….”

The servers on the second floor of the building cater to the ticketing requirements of six zones, including the Eastern Railway, South Eastern Railway, Northeast Frontier Railway, South Central Railway, East Central Railway and East Coast Railway. Officers said it was a huge relief since online booking — done through the website of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) — and offline booking done at the reservation counters in stations and other places were affected over the last two days. At least 700 railway ticket reservation counters from Calcutta to Hyderabad, Mughalsari in Uttar Pradesh and Assam’s Tinsukia were hit throughout Tuesday with the servers remaining only partially functional.

Senior railway officials said several offices of the South Eastern Railway are located across floors between eight and the 11th, including the office of the principal chief commercial manager who oversees entire commercial operations of the zone and that of the traffic accounts officer.

The other floors have offices of the chief medical director, the principal chief security commissioner, chief commercial manager of passenger marketing of the eastern railway.

The building also houses the eastern regional office of the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), which designs, develops, implements and maintains most of the important information systems of the Indian Railways.

Senior officers of the railway said officers of these departments were working from a few other satellite units, so that work was not affected.
Officers from the detective department of Calcutta police, who are probing the fire, said it was too early to deliberate when most of the floors could be thrown open.. “It’s just 72 hours. We are still trying to find out details of the building...,” said a senior officer of the probe team.

Cocaine case: 2 held

Two men were arrested on Wednesday in connection with the cocaine case for allegedly supplying the white powder to Amrita Singh, who had in turn had allegedly supplied it to BJP leader Rakesh Singh.

Farhan Ahmed, 26, and Daim Akhtar, 25, were produced before the Alipore NDPS court on Wednesday.