NEW DELHI: They had been waiting for their husbands and fathers to return home for Diwali. Instead, families travelled from Bihar to Old Delhi on Saturday to take their loved ones back in coffins.
The death toll in the three-storey building collapse in Gali Shahtara, in Old Delhi’s Hauz Qazi area, rose to six on Saturday after rescuers recovered three more bodies from the debris, officials said. All six deceased have been identified. Two injured persons are stable, while one person remains trapped under the rubble. The remaining debris is expected to be cleared by Saturday night.
Meanwhile, police arrested the building owner, identified as Saimullah alias Ayub, a resident of Gali Shahtara, on Saturday. Three contractors had already been arrested on Friday in connection with the collapse.
The six deceased have been identified as Sanjeet Kumar, Kishori Sah, Pankaj Sharma, Vipin Ram, Shantu Mukhiya and Dinesh Sah, according to police. All of them hailed from Bihar, and some of them lived in Mandawali in Delhi in a rented accommodation.
As the rescue operation continued till the filing of the report, grief and desperation unfolded in the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood, where families of the deceased labourers arrived from Bihar to identify their loved ones and take their bodies home. Tensions escalated briefly when one family was allegedly denied a last glimpse of the body, triggering scenes of chaos. Relatives screamed and broke down, while one family member fainted amid the commotion.
Among those waiting for the body of her father was 22-year-old Kiran, who had travelled from Aligarh with her family. Her father, Dinesh Sah, who hailed from Bihar and lived in Mandawali, was among those killed in the collapse.
Dinesh’s wife, Soniya Devi, was in Bihar when the tragedy struck. She had asked her husband whether she should return to Delhi for Diwali, but he had assured her that he would come home himself this year. After several years, he had planned to celebrate the festival with his family in Bihar.
Dinesh was the sole earning member of the family, which comprises four married daughters and a 22-year-old unemployed son.
His eldest daughter, 26-year-old Manju, said the family had been preparing for Diwali at her in-laws’ home when they received the news.
“I was making rangoli in my hometown when I got the news. We rushed here, leaving my two children at home and bringing along my three-month-old daughter,” she said.
She said she had seen her father working as a labourer since she was three years old and that he had married off all four of his daughters.
Kiran, who is married in Aligarh, said she had been waiting for nearly two days to identify her father’s body. “We have just been sitting on the edge of a nearby shop, waiting endlessly,” she said.
Another family from Bihar’s Hanuman Nagar was mourning the death of 26-year-old Shantu Mukhiya, a construction labourer who had been working in Delhi for the past nine years.
His 23-year-old wife, Manisha, arrived in Delhi on Saturday noon with their three children and other relatives after learning about the collapse. Shantu, who lived in Mandawali, earned around Rs 800 a day through daily-wage work and was the sole breadwinner of the family.
The couple has three children: a five-year-old son, a 10-month-old son and a three-year-old daughter. With no one to fall back on, Manisha is now left to raise the children without the family’s only source of income.
For both families, the tragedy has come just days before Diwali, turning what should have been a homecoming into a journey to claim the bodies of those they had expected to welcome back.