GHAZIABAD: A daily wage worker died while cleaning a septic tank at a house in Khora’s Indira Garden on Sunday, and his colleague too fell victim to the toxic fumes trying to save him. The workers – Sunil Singh (32) and Sunil Kumar (38), both from Bulandshahr – did not have any safety gear when they entered the sewage chamber. Police said they have filed a case against the house owner, who is now absconding. The incident is a near-repeat of the four sanitation workers’ deaths at a hospital in Faridabad on October 5. On that day, two workers who had entered the septic tank died after inhaling hazardous fumes and two others died trying to rescue them. They were also not equipped with any protective gear. In Ghaziabad, the two daily wage workers lived with their families in Khora. “House owner Rajbali Patel (35) had called the two labourers for cleaning drainage pipes and the septic tank. Both of them had cleaned the pipes first and around 11am, they started to clean the septic tank,” said Altaf Ansari, SHO of Khora police station. “Kumar had gone into the tank and fell unconscious. Singh, who was smoking outside at the time, went inside to help him, but he too lost consciousness. The locals rushed to rescue them and managed to pull them out while they called the police. We took the workers to Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital in New Delhi, where the doctors declared them dead,” the SHO said, adding the workers did not have any safety gear such as masks or PPEs. Neighbours corroborated the sequence of events. Pawan Sharma, who lives in the area, said he and some other locals were sitting outside their houses when they heard the workers crying for help. “We rushed to the spot, which was just 15 to 20 metres away, and saw the two workers inside the septic tank. We managed to pull them out with the help of a rope and informed the cops, he said. An FIR was registered against Rajbali Patel on the basis of a complaint by a family member of one of the workers. The accused, who is on the run, has been booked under Section 304 (punishment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the IPC, the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act, and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Ansari said. The workers’ bodies have been sent for autopsy and the results are awaited, the SHO said. Manual scavenging is outlawed in India, but it is still widely practised, especially in the unregulated private sector. The workers, many of whom belong to disadvantaged communities, are often hired by private contractors who do not provide safety gear and machines to clean sewage tanks in a scientific manner. In 2019, five sanitation workers had died while cleaning a sewer tank in Nandgram.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ghaziabad/ghaziabad-2-workers-die-cleaning-septic-tank-in-house/articleshow/94903590.cms