A migrant worker from Purbasthali in East Burdwan, aged 17, perished in the Morbi bridge collapse in Gujarat, which has claimed at least 134 lives as of Sunday night.
With four other migrant labourers from Bengal, Habibul Sheikh, 17, a high school dropout who moved to Morbi to work at his uncle’s jewellery store 10 months ago, walked to the “hanging bridge” on Sunday night.
“In Morbi, Gujarat, my eldest brother owns a jewellery store. He informed me of my son’s passing in the accident late on Sunday. After he passed Madhyamik last year, we had accepted him to Class XI. However, he quit school ten months ago and went to work in Morbi to support the family, according to Mahibul Sheikh, Habibul’s father and a sharecropper in Kesabhati village, East Burdwan’s Purbasthali.
Habibul and his four friends from Hooghly and Howrah visited the hanging bridge on Sunday, four days after it became open to the public. Sources claim that Habibul’s companions were harmed and undergoing medical care at the civil hospital in Morbi.
Our shop and the market were both closed in observance of Diwali. He came to me on Sunday morning to request permission to take his friends to see the bridge. Habibul’s uncle Sahibul Shiekh told The Telegraph on the phone while travelling through Ahmedabad airport, “It would have been better if I had said no. The remains are being transported by Sahibul, who has lived in Morbi for the past ten years, back to his home in Kalna.
He claimed that although the Gujarat government had set up an ambulance to transport the boy’s body from Morbi Hospital to Ahmedabad Airport, he was still had to pay for the airline ticket and the expense of doing so.
“I am currently in Ahmedabad Airport with my nephew’s body. An ambulance was dispatched by the Gujarat government to the airport in Ahmedabad. But we had to pay for the transportation of the body and the airfare,” he stated. Sahibul claimed that in addition to purchasing airline tickets, he needed to borrow Rs 55,000 from friends in Gujarat to cover the cost of transporting the body. He continued, “The Gujarat government should have sent.
“We met the family members and informed them that our government will repay the money spent on bringing the boy’s corpse home if Gujarat would not help.