AHMEDABAD – Two sanitation workers died due to suffocation while cleaning a sewage line in Dholka town in Ahmedabad, police said on Sunday.

The incident occurred on Saturday at 5 p.m. when the workers entered the sewage line and subsequently lost consciousness. They were immediately taken to a nearby hospital, where they were pronounced dead upon arrival.

The deceased workers have been identified as Gopal Padhar, aged 24, and Bijal Padhar, aged 32.

An official from Dholka police station stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation. An FIR has been filed against contractors Ashiq Thakor and Jagdish Thakor at Dholka police station. The charges include culpable homicide not amounting to murder under the Indian Penal Code Section 304 and relevant provisions of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Earlier, the Gujarat government had revealed in the Legislative Assembly that 11 sanitation workers have died from asphyxiation while cleaning drains across the state in the last two years.

In response to the alarming statistics, NGO Manav Garima filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Gujarat High Court on Tuesday, demanding measures to prevent further deaths among manhole workers and compensation for the families of deceased workers.

The NGO claims that the government has yet to compensate the families of 26 out of 152 manhole workers who died between 1993 and 2014.

The NGO says that despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act’s Section 7, which bans local authorities or their agencies from employing people for hazardous sewer cleaning in underground drainage lines or septic tanks, such practices continue to cause numerous fatalities. The organisation reported that 45 incidents involving the deaths of 95 workers have occurred while cleaning septic tanks. -IANS