Shrey Guleri echoes most other production houses in the country
when he says that he is willing to offer compensation to Niki
on humane grounds, but is not bound by any regulations to do so.
He
spoke to Aparna Joshi clarifying his stand on the matter.
Niki
has charged your production house with negligence on the set,
which resulted in the accident. Your comments?
There was no negligence, it was just an accident. When we
hire an artiste, we don't check his driving license; we take his
word that he can drive. As it was, the cameraman, Nadeem Khan
was standing in as director on that day as I was away. He realised
the junior artiste was not comfortable driving the car, but did
not anticipate the situation that occurred. The junior artiste,
on his part, was probably too stunned when Niki suddenly came
into view and hence pressed the wrong pedal.
I immediately rushed Niki to hospital, and cancelled my other
shootings for the day. We paid the initial deposit towards her
treatment too. The next day, I realised that she was blaming my
company for the incident, had filed an FIR…that was when I decided
to stop visiting her. She had approached the Cine & TV Artistes'
Association too. You cannot move two forums at the same time.
This was probably the first time in the industry an artiste approached
the police after an accident on the sets. Now, let the court take
its course and we will pay up accordingly.
Is the production house responsible for any accident occurring
on the set?
According to the contracts, I am not liable to pay any compensation
in case of any mishaps. Even when a channel asks us to make any
specific serial, there is usually no provision of third party
insurance. This is the way the industry works.
Are you planning to go in for set insurance for future projects?
I think we might. We have had a problem earlier too, when
there was a fire on the Chandrakanta set and we lost nearly
Rs 75 lakh (Rs 7.5 million) worth of costumes. The serial had
to go off air for some time due to this.
Even Gharwali Uparwali suffered. Star asked me to replace
the artiste and continue with the serial, but I asked for time,
saying let us pull it off air till Niki is better.
Have you taken any action against anyone on the set for negligence?
Everything that could be done had been done. We usually don't
run cross-checks on artistes' backgrounds before hiring them.
Of course, the episode director should have been more careful
when he realised the artiste was not comfortable driving the car.
Khan, of course, no longer works for us. But how can it proved
that it was any one person's fault? It was just an unfortunate
chain of circumstances.
