A 19-year-old law student playing with a basketball in the fire refuge of a residential highrise off the Bypass plunged eight floors to his death on Friday morning.
Rudra Pratim Ray, in his second year at the National University of Juridical Sciences, and his elder sister Tiya had stepped out of their apartment in Tower 1 of Ruchira Residency, not far from the Ruby roundabout, around 10am to go somewhere when he started bouncing the basketball in the 400sq ft open area to the left.
Tiya, older by two years, had pressed the button for the lift by then and was asking her brother to stop playing but he kept bouncing the ball, a neighbour said.
When the lift arrived, Tiya stepped in and the door closed. By the time she reached the ground floor of the building, Rudra had tragically tumbled over the three-foot-high railing of the fire refuge.
"I heard a scream followed by a thud. I went down and saw the boy on the ground with blood oozing out of his ears, nostrils and mouth," recounted N.R. Banerjee, retired vice-chancellor of the erstwhile Bengal Engineering and Science University.
Banerjee lives on the second floor of Tower 1, one of several blocks comprising the residential complex on the Prince Anwar Shah Road connector.
Neighbours said Rudra and his sister had been living in Ruchira Residency for about a year with an elderly domestic help who has been with them since their childhood. The siblings' parents, Arun Kumar and Mohar Ray, live in Bhubaneswar. Ray, an IPS officer, is an additional director-general of police in Odisha.
Professor Samir Saha, who teaches mechanical engineering at Jadavpur University, said there was a 75 to 80 per cent chance of an adult losing balance and tumbling over a waist-high railing after making contact with it while in motion.
"The weight of the head makes the upper part of the body heavier than the lower part, which is why the point of balance is above the waist. From what I gather, in this case the railing was about 40 inches high but should have been higher by at least 10 more inches," he said. "For a child to peep over such a railing would be riskier."
Neighbours had taken Rudra to Ruby General Hospital after the accident, but he was declared dead on arrival.
Classes at NUJS have been suspended on Saturday to mourn the student's death.
"I had seen him playing 10 minutes before the accident and then I saw him lying motionless on the ground downstairs," said Ruma Bhattacharjee, who also lives on the eighth floor of Tower 1.
The G+12 building at Ruchira Residency has a fire-refuge platform each on the eighth and twelfth floors. Residents and their guests are not supposed to go there unless there is an emergency that requires them to be evacuated.
"It is kept open so that in the event of an emergency, people can easily go there. The idea of having these open spaces is that ladders can reach someone from outside should there be a need to evacuate them," said Kshounish Mitra, a resident of the sixth floor in Tower 1. At Ruchira, many people keep potted plants and hang clothes out to dry on the fire-refuge platforms, a resident said.
