NEW DELHI: A labourer, 40, died and two of his colleagues are critical after being sent into a manhole to repair and clean it in northwest Delhi’s Ashok Vihar Phase-II late on Tuesday night. None of them had any safety equipment. When the first worker collapsed after inhaling poisonous fumes, another went in to save him and died. The third, who tried to rescue the two, lost consciousness. Police called the manager of a company, which engaged the three on contractual basis, for questioning. They registered a case under several sections, including one banning manual scavenging.‘No mask, oxygen or even cloth given to cover face’ According to police, information about the people falling inside a sewer near Harihar apartments was received via a PCR call at Ashok Vihar police station at 11.30pm.“Arvind, along with three others, Sonu and Narayan, also from Kasganj, and Naresh from Bihar, entered a sewer as part of ongoing cleaning work when they fell unconscious, allegedly due to toxic gases,” a senior police officer said.Arvind was rushed to DDU Hospital, where he was declared brought dead. The other two, Sonu(45) and Naresh (30) remain in critical condition in the ICU.

At Deep Chand Babu Hospital’s ICU ward, Narayan (32), one of the workers, told TOI, “I was the one who opened the lid of the sewer that day,” he said. “After that, Sonu was told to go inside. We had tied a rope around his waist, but no safety equipment was provided to him. He wasn’t given any mask, no oxygen, not even a cloth to cover his face. He was just asked to go down and cut a pipe that was inside the sewer for some repair and cleaning work.“The moment Sonu cut the pipe, we saw him collapse. He just fell unconscious inside. To save him, Arvind immediately tied himself with the same rope and went in. But as soon as he reached down, he too fell unconscious. After that, Naresh tried to go in and bring them out, but the same thing happened to him. One after another, all three of them collapsed inside that sewer,” Narayan said. “I raised an alarm and shouted for help. Some locals gathered and together we somehow managed to pull them out with the rope. But by then all three were completely unconscious. They went in only to save each other. That’s how we lost him.” Arvind was the sole breadwinner of his family, which includes his wife and two young sons aged 12 and 7. His daily earnings ranged between Rs 500 and Rs 800 and the family depended entirely on that income. For the past 15 years, he had been doing contractual work, often travelling to Delhi and taking up odd jobs. Sonu, too, is the only earning member in his family and supports his two sons, aged one-and-a-half and five. At the spot, the manhole on the busy residential stretch lay open the next day, access to it blocked only by a police barricade. Scattered around were the belongings of the workers, slippers, broken bluetooth headsets and a lone slipper floating inside the manhole’s dirty sewer water. “Preliminary inquiries revealed that the sewer cleaning work was underway for several days, carried out under the supervision of a construction company,” police officer added.