Swapan Mondal had gone to work at the warehouse construction site in Garden Reach, hoping to earn enough money to repair the leaking roof of his two-room house in Shyamnagar. He was among the 15 men crushed to death when the structure collapsed on Wednesday.
Metro spoke to his daughter, Piu Mondal, a resident of Basudevpur in Shyamnagar, North 24-Parganas:
My father usually earned ₹500 or ₹600 a day. But for this project, the contractor had offered ₹1,000 a day. It was a seven-day project, and my father agreed. He told us he wanted to repair our roof once he returned with the money. Our tiled roof had been leaking, and we had not been able to repair it for a long time. He called us around 10.30am on Wed-nesday to say he was all right and was going to work. A few hours later, we heard that he was among the dead.
He will never come back. But my simple question is: why were the people working inside not taken to safety when the structure had started shaking? The contractor, the labour supplier and all the officials responsible for the work should be held accountable. I still cannot imagine that baba is no more.
That day (Tuesday), I dropped him at Shyamnagar railway station on my scooter. His last words to me were, “Bhalo thakish, shabdhane thakish (Stay well. Stay safe)”.