Five men who went to Karnataka for work from a remote village in West Bengal died in a gas leak at a fish processing unit in Mangalore on Sunday evening. Three others, also from Bengal, fell sick because of the gas leak and are being treated at a Karnataka hospital.
The West Bengal government on Monday announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh for the families of the deceased. The accident happened in the Mangalore Special Economic Zone around 7pm on Sunday.
“The state government will provide a compensation of Rs 2 lakh for the family of each of the five men who died in the Karnataka incident,” Jawed Shamim, West Bengal’s additional director-general of police (law and order), said at Nabanna on Monday.
Thousands of youths in the state migrate to other states every year in search of jobs to support their families. The workers who died were from various parts of Deganga in North 24-Parganas district. They were aged between 18 and 32 years, sources in the home department said.
The bodies of the five underwent post-mortem on Monday. They would be flown back to Kolkata on Tuesday, said a senior official at Nabanna.
A worker had entered a fish tank to clean it when the accident happened, sources said.
When the worker failed to resurface after sometime, seven others took the plunge to save him. They all were brought out of the tank after sometime. Five of them were declared dead in hospital.
