Lucknow:
One labourer died while five were injured when a freshly dug trench caved in at one of the multi-crore dream projects of chief minister Mayawati here on Saturday.
No official was ready to confirm where the tragedy occurred and they were giving evasive replies to pointed queries about the location of the mishap.
After nearly three hours of the incident, the district administration came up with a bright idea of blaming the accident on a private builder, who has been awarded some major construction contracts of the Mayawati government.
Officials were evidently taking full advantage of the ignorance of the injured labourers , who belonged to a neigbouring district and had no idea about the location of the place where the tragedy occurred .
Meanwhile the contractor, who had brought the injured to the government run Lohia hospital , quietly slipped out of the hospital and his place was taken by a representative of the construction company named by Lucknow district police chief Rajiv Krishna. "The victims were engaged by one SAS builders, who were constructing a huge residential complex on Jopling Road where the tragedy occurred", Krishna told reporters
However, this came in sharp contradiction to the statement made by two of the injured labourers who told mediapersons including different TV channels that the place had a statue of Mayawati and her mentor the late Kanshi Ram - a description that matches well with the Rs. 1250 - crore Ambedkar Memorial that was in the final stages of construction.
"We belong to Sitapur so we do not know the name of the place where we were engaged to work; but I can tell you it was a big area with a statue of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram, besides a number of stone elephants ", disclosed the injured labourers, Mustaqeem and Sunder.
The state government had apparently got into the denial mode only on account of an order of the Supreme Court that had stalled all construction activity at the site. A confession of the truth would put the government to major embarrassment because of an alleged willful violation of the apex court's order.
"The dead man has been identified as Prabhu and we are sending his body for post-mortem after which we will make arrangements to have the body transported to his home", said a district official at the hospital.