The police registered an first information report on Monday after two men died of suffocation while cleaning a septic tank of a house near Gurugram’s Mohammadpur Jharsa village, reported PTI.
The deceased have been identified as Dilip, a sanitation worker, and Mohammad Shahabuddin, a local tailor.
The police lodged the FIR at Sector 37 police station in Gurugram based on a complaint by Dilip’s son Sorav, reported The Indian Express. Sorav alleged that a man named Bhim took Dilip and Shahabuddin to his home on Sunday evening to clean the septic tank.
“After reaching there, he left my father and Shahabuddin in the pit without any safety equipment,” the complaint said, reported the newspaper. “They were cleaning while he stood outside the pit. My father and Shahabuddin died due to the poisonous gas inside the pit.”
The police also confirmed that the men had entered the tank without any safety equipment to clean it. The accused has been booked under Section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.
“We are trying to find the accused but he has left the village and is absconding,” an unidentified police official told The Indian Express. “Action will be taken against him on the basis of the complaint.”
The men were rescued from the septic tank after a four-hour long operation.
Manual scavenging – or the practice of removing human excreta by hand from sewer lines or septic tanks – is banned under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. But the practice remains prevalent in many parts of India.
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