A 35-year-old van driver died in the Sujabad area of Varanasi on Tuesday morning after a live electric wire hanging low over the road came into contact with his vehicle. His young daughter, who was in the van with him, was pulled out safely by people nearby.
The driver, Vishnu Sahni, drove a Magic, the small commercial van widely used around Varanasi to carry passengers. According to his family, he had taken his little daughter out for a ride in the van on Tuesday morning. Sujabad lies on the far bank of the Ganga, across the Rajghat bridge from the old city.
On the way, he put the van in reverse to make room for a tractor. As the van moved back, it touched the sagging line and current passed into the vehicle. Sahni was badly burnt.
People who saw it happen used a wooden stick to lift the wire off the van, then got the child out without harm. Family members and residents took Sahni to hospital. Doctors there found his condition serious and referred him to a trauma centre, but he died before he could reach it.
He leaves behind two young daughters. News of his death spread anger through the neighbourhood, and his family and residents are demanding action against the power department officials they hold responsible.
Both the police and the power department have said they are waiting for the post-mortem report. Sanjay Kumar Mishra, in-charge of the local police station, said appropriate legal action would follow once the report is in. Manoj Kashyap, sub-divisional officer of the electricity department, said action would be taken against whoever is found responsible after the report arrives.
The family and residents make several allegations about the line. They say the wire had been drawn from a transformer about 100 to 150 metres away and had been left hanging over the road even though people had complained about it before. They also allege that about a year ago, some people walking in a wedding procession were burnt by the same wire, and that nobody fixed it afterwards.
The electricity department has not responded to the claim that earlier complaints were made. Residents further allege that since the accident, an attempt is being made to pass off the line as a private wire so that no one in the department has to answer for it. They want an inquiry into the state of the wire and the way it was connected to the transformer, followed by strict legal action against those found at fault.
None of these claims has been tested yet, and the officials' statements so far go no further than promising action after the post-mortem. One point any inquiry will have to settle is whether the line was a department connection or a private one, since that decides who was responsible for keeping it safe.
Overhead lines across the district have taken a beating this season. A storm with winds of about 50 km/h brought down trees and power lines in several parts of the city on Monday evening, as Dalimss reported in its account of the evening storm that forced three flights to divert to Lucknow, and late last month a storm brought down an electric pole in Cholapur's Jagdishpur and cut supply to the area. Nothing said by officials so far links Tuesday's accident to the weather.
For anyone who spots a sagging, snapped or sparking line, the Uttar Pradesh power helpline is 1912, and it takes complaints round the clock. Keep people and animals away from the wire, never touch it or anything it is resting on with metal, and call 112 at once if someone has been hurt. A complaint logged on the helpline also leaves a record that a fault was reported.
For the Sahni family, the next step depends on a report that both the police and the power department say will decide what they do. Until it comes, the question at the heart of their complaint, why a live wire was left hanging that low over a public road, has no official answer.
