Three die in Kolkata Leather Complex sewer, soon after Supreme Court ban
Telegraph | 4 February 2025
Three workers died inside an underground sewer at the Kolkata Leather Complex on Sunday morning, four days after the Supreme Court prohibited manual scavenging and manual sewer-cleaning in six metros including Calcutta.
A preliminary inquiry suggests a contractor engaged the workers to clean clogged underground sewers at the complex, located in Bantala on the city’s eastern fringes, police said.
Mayor and urban development minister Firhad Hakim wondered why oxygenated air was not pumped into the sewers before the labourers were sent down.
An official of the Kolkata Municipal Development Authority (KMDA), which had engaged the contractor who brought in the labourers, claimed the men were not cleaning the sewers but building a new manhole for an improved sewerage system.
Daily workers at the government complex – which houses 500 private tanneries and is maintained by the KMDA – told the police that most of the sewers, regularly clogged by leather scrapings, had not been cleaned thoroughly for years.
The police identified the victims as Hasibur Rahaman, 26, and Farjen Seikh, 60, from Lalgola in Murshidabad and Suman Sardar, 30, from Najat in North 24-Parganas. They said the men had probably been suffocated to death by toxic gases. The incident occurred around 9am.
Hakim said an inquiry would be held to ascertain the exact cause of the deaths and fix responsibility. “If the labour contractor or even an official of the department is found responsible, necessary action will be taken against them,” he told reporters.
This is the second such tragedy in a decade at the leather complex, where toxic fumes killed three people in 2015 while they were cleaning an overflowing pit at one of the leather-processing units.
The Centre banned the use of manual labour to clean dry toilets in 1993. In 2013, the law was amended to also ban manual labour in cleaning sewers, ditches, pits and septic tanks.
On January 29, the Supreme Court passed an order prohibiting manual sewer-cleaning and scavenging in the metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Calcutta.
The special bench of Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Justice Aravind Kumar instructed the municipal commissioners of the six metros to submit affidavits by February 13, spelling out the compliance measures taken. The next hearing is on February 19.
“The accident took place inside an underground drain in Zone 7 of the Kolkata Leather Complex in front of Plot 452,” a senior officer at the Kolkata Leather Complex police station said. “Workers from the disaster management group and the fire and emergency services managed to retrieve the bodies after a nearly four-hour search. We are waiting for the post-mortem reports.”