The nine workers who died in an accident at a construction site in north Chennai on Tuesday night were all young men from the Dimasa tribe, hailing from a cluster of villages in Assam and living and working together in Tamil Nadu. The nine were working at the site of a 1,320-megawatt Ennore Special Economic Zone thermal power project near Ponneri. They had been building a concrete arch over 20 feet above the ground when the metal scaffolding gave way, sending them crashing down nearly 30 feet. Twenty-year-old Provit Thaosen had wound up his shift at work at the site, and was waiting for his brother Sorbojit Thaosen (27) to be brought down from the arch when it came crashing down. “Four teams were there, and two teams were still working. I finished my work, came down from the arch and was waiting on the side for the others. We would go up and down the arch in a bucket attached to a crane. My brother and around nine other people were waiting up on the arch, and the bucket was going up to bring them down. Suddenly, there was a loud sound, like a pipe bursting. We all started looking around to see what had caused it. Even the people on the arch were looking around, and then, the whole thing collapsed,” he said. The two brothers lived in a rented room a few kilometres away from the construction site, where they had been working since March this year. They shared the room with four other young men from their village, Misibailam, in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district. They too worked at the same site. While the less experienced workers like Provit earn around Rs 19,000 per month, the more experienced ones like his brother get paid Rs 24,000-25,000. Most of the men who died on Tuesday had brothers and cousins who worked at the same site, and they were all at Chennai’s Stanley Government Hospital on Wednesday morning, waiting to claim their bodies. Among them was Joybiddya Sorong (45), whose brother Prayanto Sorong (28) died in the incident. “I work as a supervisor at the same site, but I was in another part when it happened. We still don’t know what exactly happened and how the whole thing collapsed,” he said. These two brothers are from Nabhanga village in Assam’s Hojai. Four of the men who died in the incident were from Nabhanga, including 40-year-old Paban Sarang, whose cousin Muktidhar Phanglaw, who works elsewhere in Chennai, came rushing to the hospital. “More than 80% of the men from our village work outside, in different places, as migrant workers because of the lack of employment opportunities and low wages back home. If there was work in our own place, why would we be here?” said Phawlang, adding that his cousin Paban has a wife and daughter back in the village. Provit Thaosen said that his brother Sorbojit has worked at similar project sites in different parts of the country for years. “He has been doing this work for so many years. Even yesterday, everything was going as it had been for months on the site. No one thought that something like this could happen. We still don’t understand what went wrong and how this happened,” he said. The six other men who died are Munna Kemprai, Phaibit Fanglu, Bidayum Porbosa, Suman Kharikap, Dimaraj Thousen, and Dipak Raijung. Their bodies are expected to be brought back to Assam on Thursday.
