VIJAYAWADA: A six-year-old boy died when a wall, reportedly a portion of a church that he had entered to play in, fell on him as the workers working there to construction a storm drain pulled it down with the help of heavy construction equipment, in the Pinnamaneni Polyclinic Road under Machavaram police station limits, on Wednesday evening.
According to local sources a demolition drive was going on in the area as part of storm drainage works. However, when TNIE contacted VMC city planner K Lakshman Rao for his reactions to the tragedy he said that the civic body did not carry out any demolition works in the Pinnamaneni Polyclinic Road and therefore VMC was in no way responsible for the incident.
However, sources said that a subcontractor of L&T could have been carrying out the demolition drive. When contacted an L&T representative said, that works in connection with construction of storm drains were being carried out in the Pinnamaneni Polyclinic Road, as per the plan given by the VMC town planning officials. “The demolition works (were) awarded to a subcontractor, who arranged a JCB to demolish a structure for constructing the drain at the spot. While executing the works, the boy ran towards the JCB and got injured badly. Immediately, the local staff shifted the boy to a nearby hospital, where he succumbed to death,” the L&T official said.
According to the Machavaram police officials, one JCB machine was being used to demolish a few houses in a bid to make space for construction of storm drain in the Pinnamaneni Polyclinic road. While the JCB driver Ramana was demolishing a small portion of a church, the victim Nagesh, without seeing the JCB demolishing the structure, went inside it to play.
The driver, who was unaware of the boy playing behind the wall, pulled it down and the wall fell on the boy. After hearing the boy’s screams, workers rescued the boy from under the debris and rushed him to the government hospital for treatment. However, he breathed his last on way to hospital. A case was registered against the JCB driver under section 304A, the police source said.
