Fixing mall window, labourer falls to death

DESPERATE TO get his dues, 40year-old Jamadar Shah left home for work on Sunday morning. He told his wife Usha Devi he would return at 3 pm. Instead, she received a call at a little after noon that he had met with an accident. Devi, who stays in Mahavir Enclave, rushed to the hospital in Dwarka, where doctors told her that Shah had died due to brain injury.

Shah died after he fell 40 feet from a ladder, while he was fixing a mall window in Dwarka’s Sector 13, police said.

DCP (southwest) Surender Kumar said a case under IPC sections 288 (negligent conduct with respect to pulling down or repair) and 304A (death due to negligence) has been booked against the mall’s owner.

“We will file an employee accident report in the court in the next 20 days. We have booked the owner of the mall. We will investigate the project and the contractual work. Then we will figure out who the primary contractor is and, after examining his income tax returns, we will fix compensation for the victim,” Kumar said.

According to Shah’s colleague Rakesh Kumar, the incident took place around 11.45 am Sunday. Rakesh said the two were working on an aluminium ladder-like structure when the base became unstable and they slipped.

Rakesh said that when he and Shah reached the mall, they found there was no proper iron structure on which they could stand and work. He claimed, “We told our contractor and the mall management to provide us with a proper structure, but they told us to manage. The base had wheels on it. Though brakes were applied on the wheels, it was still unstable. We had never worked on this structure before. But we needed the money, so we got to work.”

He added, “We both fell but I landed on an empty space at the mall’s window.” He said Shah and him had started working in 2007.

Sub-contractor Subhash Kumar claimed he had spoken to the mall management for a better structure. “I was talking to the owner about it when Shah and his partner climbed up and started working. By the time I came back, he had already fallen,” Kumar claimed.

Devi, meanwhile, alleged that her husband was called in with the assurance that if he finished the work, his dues of Rs 50,000 would be cleared.

“He had not received payment for the last three months,” she alleged. Shah is survived by hiswife,twodaughtersandason.

Abhishek Angad Family and neighbours of Jamadar Shah.