A four-storey under-construction building collapsed in Chawri Bazar, Delhi, on Thursday, leaving labourers Bipin Ram and Pankaj Sharma feared trapped under the debris and prompting their relatives to rush to the site from nearby Mandawli. The two men, who came from Bihar’s Khagaria district for construction work, had been living in Mandawli’s Railway Colony.
According to relatives quoted in the report, Bipin, 42, and Pankaj, 45, were working at the building when it came crashing down. Their families were trying to find out whether they had been rescued. The report did not provide a confirmed account of their condition or the number of workers at the site at the time of the collapse.
Bipin had been travelling to Delhi for work for nearly a decade. His cousin, Suresh Pandey, said a contractor brought him to the city about six months ago, along with other men from Khagaria, to work on the building. Bipin, a father of five, had planned to return to Bihar on Saturday to celebrate Chhath Puja with his wife and children.
Pandey said Bipin had initially wanted to leave earlier for the festival but was persuaded by the contractor to work for a few more days. “How can a building just fall?” he asked, according to the report, reflecting the uncertainty facing the family as they waited near the collapse site.
Pankaj, 45, had been coming to Delhi for labour work for about 15 years, according to his relative Virendra Kumar. Kumar said Pankaj earned around Rs 20,000 a month and sent most of his income to his family in Bihar. He had also planned to remain in Delhi through Diwali so that he could spend Chhath Puja with his wife and children.
Locals told the report that construction at the site appeared to have been accelerated before winter anti-pollution restrictions came into force. One neighbour claimed that three floors had been built in just over a month and suggested that the speed of construction may have contributed to the collapse. These accounts had not been independently established in the supplied report.
The incident has brought renewed attention to the vulnerability of migrant construction workers, who often live away from their families while working on rapidly changing urban sites. For relatives in Bihar, the collapse turned a seasonal journey home into an urgent search for information in one of Delhi’s most congested commercial areas. Further details about rescue operations, the cause of the collapse and action by the authorities were not available in the supplied report.
