In what has become a depressingly familiar occurance, a group of construction labourers working on a building in Borivli had a narrow brush with death as the bamboo scaffolding gave way under their feet. One of them plunged to his death, while six others were seriously injured. The eighth worker, Mohammad Shamim, had a miraculous escape as he managed to grab on to the parapet just in time.

This scenario is familiar simply because there have been so many deaths at construction sites that these workers have just become statistics in the making of projects and infrastructure all across the city. In a front-page report in this paper yesterday, Shamim said they had all been working without a safety harness since the project’s beginning.