A liftman repairs the lift at the Heads of Department building in Bhubaneswar.

Eight persons, two of them women, were trapped for a scary 45 minutes when the lift they were in got stuck between the fourth and fifth floors of the nine-storey building around 11.35am on Thursday.

The 20-year-old lift has no power backup and got stuck because of an outage. Rules of the energy department mandate that any such lift must have power backup.

I took a fire brigade team, which was summoned from the state secretariat nearby, 30 minutes to rescue those trapped in the lift. Those trapped included four directorate employees, two visitors and two liftmen.

A liftman, on condition of anonymity, said this was not the first such incident at the building. "There is no power backup for these lifts. During power cuts, such incidents occur frequently. Today, it got a little scary as the outage lasted for an hour," he said.

The general electrical department is the licensing authority of the lifts. An official of the department told The Telegraph on condition of anonymity that the licence for the lift in question was renewed last month.

Eyewitness Sushant Kumar Pattnaik said: "The elevators in the directorate's building are old and lack maintenance. Even during the rescue operation, they forgot to switch off the main power line."

The heads of the department building is divided into two parts - one has nine floors with two lifts, while the other has five floors and a lift. Only one lift in the five-storey building has power backup. The renovation of both the buildings has been on since two years. All three lifts are decrepit and cannot be operated without the liftmen. These lifts neither have stop buttons on any floor, nor floor buttons inside. They also lack proper ventilation. The building does not even have a mandatory caretaker.

An official of the general administration department, which is responsible for taking care of the building, said new lifts would be installed in the building by the end of this year and they would have power backup. However, he did not have an answer as to why the lift that got stuck did not have power backup. A similar incident occurred in the state secretariat earlier this month when chief minister Naveen Patnaik got stuck in a lift for a few minutes.

Text: Sandeep Mishra, picture: Sanjib Mukherjee