Four labourers buried under rice sacks in City

Four labourers, including two brothers, were killed as rice sacks fell on them while they were sleeping inside a godown in outer Delhi’s Alipur during the wee hours of Friday. A colleague sleeping some distance away found the men buried under the sacks later in the morning.

A case of causing death by negligence has been registered in this connection. Senior police officers, however, said preliminary investigations do not indicate any foul play.

Each of the sacks weighed 50 kilos. The police said about 50 sacks had to be removed from the heap before the bodies could be brought out. Another labourer
Ashok Yadav who had slept some distance away from the accident spot told the police he heard no sound or cries for help in the night that could have woken him up. The police suspect that the sack heap must have prevented the cries, if any, from being heard.

“Ashok could not find the four labourers in the godown when he woke up at 7:30 am on Friday. He called out to his other colleagues on seeing the fallen rice sacks.

Together they removed the sacks to find the four men buried underneath,” said a senior police officer.

The police were informed and the victims sent to Babu Jagjivan Ram Hospital nearby where they were declared brought dead. The victims were identified as Lattun Yadav, 23, Pawan Yadav, 37, Manoj, 22, and his 24-year-old brother Santosh. All hailed from the same village in Bihar’s Samastipur district.

The godown where the four worked belonged to one Deepak Jain who deals in the wholesale supply of rice. It is located in Alipur’s Hamidpur village.

Many of the labourers working for Jain use his godowns to sleep at night. The four victims had spread empty sacks on the floor and slept around midnight on Thursday. “The four had chosen a spot between two rows of rice sacks to escape from the cold weather conditions,” Gurdayal, a labourer who slept in another godown, told Deccan Herald.

He said that the sacks were arranged in such a manner that even a little push to the pile could cause them to collapse. “I think one of the victims must have kicked the sack in his sleep,” he said.