By Prashant K. Nanda
New Delhi, July 13 (IANS) Sitting on a wheelchair, with fractures in one leg and one hand, Om Prakash Yadav seems unusually calm for a man who almost died. When a section of the Delhi Metro track collapsed, he too went down with it.

“Three of my family members are no more. I am alive because of god,” he says.

“I thought I was dead. But god came to my rescue,” says Yadav, who is the sole bread earner for his wife and five children and is being treated at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

The 48-year-old man is an employee of Gammon India, the company in charge of constructing the particular stretch of the metro track that buckled in Zamrudpur in south Delhi early Sunday, killing six people and injuring 15.

Yadav, who is from Bhagalpur in Bihar, sustained major fractures but lived to tell the tale.

“Three of my family members - brother Niranjan and nephews Pappu and Amit - died in front of me. It’s very difficult to see your family getting killed,” Yadav told IANS, his eyes brimming with tears.

“I was working on the top of the underconstruction bridge, when we heard a cracking sound and within minutes, I was crashing down along with the concrete slabs. Niranjan died on the spot.”

“There was no chance of escaping death. I thought I will die too, but it was god,” he says, his face looking completely blank and red scars showing on his pale cheeks.

He does not want to blame anyone. “Yes, we know there was a crack on pillar 67 but whom to blame. We are all working for money.”

“When we sit in the train from Bihar (in search of job), it’s not life which is most important. It’s the stomach,” he said, reflecting the plight of tens of thousands of labourers who come to the national capital in search of livelihoods.

Sunday’s accident was the worst in the history of the Delhi Metro. The prefabricated concrete slabs that collapsed were part of an elevated section of a new Metro route between the Central Secretariat and Badarpur. The accident took place early in the morning at Zamrudpur near the plush Kailash Colony in south Delhi.

Yadav said his wife and children are yet to come here. “They are crying but what can I do? I send them money every month. But now I don’t know when I will get ready to work again.”

Ask him whether he would like to go back to work after such a close shave, he says: “As I have already told you, it’s not about life but about livelihood,” he said.

While many of the victims of Sunday’s accident are recuperating in hospital, five more people were injured Monday morning when three huge cranes and a launching girder toppled over at the same accident site.

The latest tragedy occurred when hundreds of Delhi Metro workers and engineers had gathered at the site of the Sunday accident to remove tonnes of debris.

-Indo-Asian News Service

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