Hoarding falls on labourer walking by, wall collapses on elderly couple

Ghaziabad/Noida: Three daily wage earners -- a labourer walking home, and a ragpicker and his wife – died in separate accidents linked to the spate of showers across NCR on Wednesday night. Mukesh Goswami, a 55-year-old labourer living in Ghaziabad’s Kotwali, was walking to his home in the rainstorm around 8pm, when an advertisement board came loose and collapsed, killing him on the spot. Ghaziabad DCP Rajesh Kumar said the incident took place near Ghantaghar as Goswami was walking past some mobile shops. A passerby alerted cops, and a police team took Goswami to MMG Hospital, where doctors declared him dead. “Due to rain, the man was unable to find any transportation to reach home. His residence was merely a ten-minute walk from the incident site. As he began walking towards his house, the advertisement board of a shop collapsed on him,” the DCP said.Police said they have not received any complaint on the incident, but they are checking if the hoarding – 10 feet in length and 12-15 feet in breadth -- was legal or not. Asked about the incident, Ghaziabad municipal commissioner Vikramaditya Singh Malik told TOI on Thursday that initial investigation indicates the board was put up by an owner of one of the mobile shops near the site of the collapse. “Investigation is underway. We have also told all shop-owners not to fix large advertisement boards and have given 15 days’ time to remove them,” Malik said.A GMC spokesperson added that the corporation will carry out a survey to take down all illegal advertisement boards or hoardings across the city, and act against those who put them up without permission.In another incident in Greater Noida, a couple died after the boundary wall of an adjacent plot collapsed on their shanty while they were sleeping in Ambedkar Nagar Colony of Dadri.Police said they suspect the base of the boundary wall of a vacant plot became unstable as the ground was saturated with rainwater. Cops got to know about the wall collapse around 11.45pm.“A boundary wall of a plot fell on a shanty, burying Sabur Ali (62), a ragpicker, and his wife Ameena -- both belonging to Assam -- under the debris. Our team immediately tried to rescue them and rushed them to a hospital with the help of locals. Doctors declared them dead,” Ashok Kumar, additional DCP (Greater Noida), said on Thursday. Kumar said the colony has several vacant plots where people have constructed boundary walls. Daily wage earners have built their shanties next to these walls.“The wall that collapsed was 8-foot-high and was not strong enough. Due to heavy rainfall on Wednesday, its base would have become weak, leading to the collapse,” the additional DCP said.The couple’s neighbours told police that they moved to NCR two decades ago. So far, no one has complained about the incident, Kumar said. After a hot and humid July, several areas in NCR logged more than 100mm of intense rainfall in just a few hours. This downpour flooded roads, bringing traffic to a crawl, and triggered power outages that trapped residents in their high-rises and colonies.
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