Calcutta, March 12: A middle-aged Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) employee was nearly buried under files in the civic headquarters on Wednesday.

Chitra Mukherjee was at work in the stationery store of the secretary department on the second floor of the S.N. Banerjee Road office, when a stack of several hundred files collapsed on her.

The 45-year-old upper division assistant — one of the three employees who work in the 350-sq-ft room — sustained injuries on her head and hand.

The incident took place around 3pm, shortly after the lunch break. Chitra was rescued from under the files by her colleagues and taken to SSKM Hospital.

The civic employees said the recently purchased files had been kept stacked in the form of a tall column in the store. Chitra was going through a register under it, when the files started falling on her.

“Hundreds of files kept dropping on Chitra for more than a minute. She collapsed on the floor and was covered by the files. We had to remove several layers of files to reach her,” said a civic worker who was in the room.

With Chitra gasping for breath and crying in pain, senior civic officials took her to the hospital in a taxi.

“We were scared, since hundreds of files had fallen on her head. But the doctors said there was no reason to worry. She returned to her Tollygunge home after treatment,” added the employee.

The doctor who treated Chitra in the emergency ward of SSKM Hospital said that she had been advised a couple of days’ bed rest.

Chitra was transferred to the store from the accounts department last year. “It’s good that there were people in the room when the files collapsed. Otherwise, she might have found it difficult to come out from under the files alone,” said one of her colleagues.

Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya downplayed the incident. “An employee sustained minor injuries while working in the office. She was immediately taken to hospital and discharged after treatment.”

Mayoral council member (information) Faiyaz Ahmed Khan felt that the incident would not have occurred if the files had been stored in shorter stacks.

The freak accident has woken up the civic employees to the threat posed by the abundance of files in the civic headquarters. “Almost no maintenance work in carried out in our office. Files and papers are heaped on racks and in almirahs in all the departments because of lack of space. We have to work in a cramped rooms surrounded with files. What happened to Chitra can happen to any of us,” said an official in the building department.