The cleaning crew started at 9 a.m. on Sunday, February 2, 2025, at the Kolkata Leather Complex in Bantala. Then a pipe broke, and three workers dropped 10 feet into a manhole.
Police, fire services and State Disaster Relief Forces pulled their bodies out at around 1.30 p.m., roughly four hours after they fell. The dead were Farzem Sheikh, Hashi Sheikh and Suman Sardar, all from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district. Tension built in the area as the hours dragged on.
Why they died is not settled. Police said they could not rule out drowning in the wastewater or inhaling poisonous gas, and the post-mortem was still to come. The Wire reported that they were clearing chemical waste when the pipe gave way.
What officials said
Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim went to the site. “The water discharge from the factory had entered the manhole,” he told journalists. “After the discharge, gas was formed in the chamber, and the workers entered into the pit.” He promised an inquiry, said whoever was responsible would be punished, and added that the lives of poor people could not be taken for granted.
Locals claimed the men had been engaged by the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Agency. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which has jurisdiction over the drain pipe, had not commented when one outlet filed its report.
Days after a court ban
The deaths came just days after the Supreme Court, on January 29, ordered an end to manual scavenging and hazardous manual cleaning of sewers and septic tanks in six big cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. A bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Aravind Kumar heard the petition, filed by Balram Singh. The court said it was “fed up” with seeking compliance that stayed on paper. City heads were told to file affidavits by February 13 on how they were stopping the practice, and the next hearing was set for February 19.
Sanitation workers have died in West Bengal before. Four of them suffocated at Kudghat in Kolkata on February 25, 2021, while working on a sewerage improvement programme.
The National Human Rights Commission had recently held a discussion on the rights of manual scavengers. Its chairperson, Justice V. Ramasubramanian, said the causes need to be understood before remedies can be suggested, and experts there proposed using robots to clean sewage lines and septic tanks.
Sources
- Three workers die while cleaning drain in Kolkata – The Hindu
- Three workers killed during sewage cleaning near Kolkata
- Three Workers Die While Cleaning Sewage at Leather Complex Near Kolkata – The Wire
