Investigators probing the death of 40-year-old Aroop Bandopadhyay, after he got trapped in a lift at R G Kar Medical College and Hospital, in Kolkata, on Friday are focusing on potential human error and safety protocol lapses, even as records show the elevator had cleared a routine inspection earlier this month, a police officer said on Sunday.
A central component of the police inquiry involves the elevator’s machine room—a separate control unit used to manage the lift during mechanical failures.
“After primary investigation we suspect that the machine room was accessed by someone post accident who had no expertise. We are verifying who entered there and what actions were taken,” said a police official.
It is also being investigated whether the power supply was externally disconnected or if manual intervention in the control room inadvertently caused the lift to move while the victim was caught in the doors.
The hospital asserts the lift underwent a “standard health check” in early March with no major defects reported. However, the timeline of the rescue operation suggests a massive breakdown in communication.
In the absence of any camera inside the elevator, police are relying on CCTV footage from outside the lift to get to the root cause of the incident, the officer said. CCTV footage shows Bandyopadhyay near the Trauma Care operation theater at 4:15 am, and his body was brought to a ward at 5:12 am, the police officer said. The lift maintenance agency was allegedly first notified of the incident at 6:30 am.
On Friday, Bandopadhyay died after getting stuck inside an elevator at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. He had entered the lift at the Trauma Care Centre around 3 am, after his son’s fractured leg surgery, when it allegedly malfunctioned, leaving him and two others trapped. The lift descended to a dark basement with a locked outer iron grill. While Bandopadhyay managed to push his wife and child to safety, the lift suddenly moved upward, dragging him against a cement wall.
Recounting the harrowing ordeal, Bandopadhyay’s wife, Sonali Dutta Bandyopadhyay, said, “I saw my husband bleeding profusely. He was stuck like that for 1.5 hours. Imagine a person is bleeding and stuck for more than an hour and ultimately dies inside a hospital premises.”
The victim’s sister slammed the hospital’s preparedness, saying, “When we were screaming they said ‘we do not have keys we can’t help’. Why does it take a tragedy/death for the government to learn lessons? When you don’t have access to keys, why would you keep the gate locked like that?”
The Detective department of the Kolkata Police’s Homicide branch has taken over the investigation into the incident. The police have arrested three lift operators and two security personnel under sections of the BNS related to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
The police may consult the Public Works Department (PWD) to determine if mandatory safety manuals and training protocols were ignored by the staff on duty.
Saptarshi Chattopadhyay, the hospital superintendent said that a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is being implemented immediately. “Of course if there was a lift man 24×7 death would not have occurred. There are 32 lifts inside RG Kar; if there is no lift man, we are not allowing people to use those elevators. Every lift will have a stool and a lift man in it.”