The body of a 44-year-old migrant laborer who died after falling from the third floor of an under-construction building in Maharashtra was returned to his village in West Bengal’s South Dinajpur district on Tuesday, casting a pall of grief over the rural community he had left in search of work.
The worker, Shyamal Hasda, a resident of the Basuria area under the Azmatpur gram panchayat, had been employed as a construction laborer in Maharashtra. According to local residents, he fell accidentally from the building on Saturday night and later died at a hospital.
With the assistance of the construction company and Maharashtra police, his body was transported by ambulance across state lines and reached his home on Tuesday. Family members and neighbors gathered as the vehicle arrived, many of them in tears.The death has also stirred political recriminations in the district ahead of upcoming elections.
Swarup Chowdhury, the district president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, said the incident underscored what he described as a lack of employment opportunities in the state. “People from the district and the state are being forced to migrate for work and are even dying outside their homes,” he said, calling for greater efforts to create government jobs and establish industries locally.
Leaders of the governing Trinamool Congress rejected the criticism. Subhash Chaki, a district party leader and Town President of Balurghat Municipality, accused the opposition of exploiting a tragedy for political gain. He noted that workers from many states come to West Bengal for employment and said that citizens are free to seek work anywhere in the country. “It was an accident, and the BJP is doing politics over a death,” he said, adding that the federal government had not taken sufficient steps in recent years to promote industrial development in the state West Bengal.
For residents of Basuria, however, the political debate felt distant as they mourned a man who had traveled far from home in hopes of supporting his family — and did not return alive.
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