Daily Times

LAHORE: The Awami Workers Party (AWP) has strongly condemned the government and its private contractor, engaged for the Orange Line Metro Train (OMT) project, for their criminal negligence that led to the death of seven workers at the construction site.

Activists of the AWP have protest demonstration outside the Lahore Press Club on Wednesday, demanding the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) and its private contractors for the project to immediately make public the provisions put in place to ensure safety of workers employed for the project.

It also asked the LDA and its private contractors to inform the public about the activities undertaken before the start of construction work to sensitise the workers about the safety provisions.

The AWP demanded that an independent inquiry should immediately be launched to fix responsibility for criminal negligence that led to the accident. The inquiry should be overseen by representatives of trade unions and should focus specifically on safety provisions, their implementation and efforts carried out, if any, to sensitise workers about them, it added.

Speaking on the occasion, AWP President Ghulam Mujtaba said that the workers were sleeping in their makeshift accommodation at the construction site when an under-construction wall fell on them. “The manner in which the incident unfolded suggests that either construction standards were not up to the mark or the standards were not upheld by the contractor,” he added.

He further said that the AWP would not let the provincial and city district government and their private contractor get away with the incident by referring to it as an ‘accident’. “If the government and the contractor had done their jobs properly, there was no reason why an under-construction wall should have fallen in the first place,” he said.

He said this is not the first instance of loss of workers’ lives in the OMT project. Earlier in the year, two workers had died when a crane they were operating touched bare electricity wires, adding that loss of precious lives in workplace accidents has been a recurrent occurrence in the country. “We have seen accidents like the one that took place last year in Sundar Industrial Estate, and before that in the Baldia Factory, Lahore. To date, there has been no serious effort towards fixing responsibility for these accidents and loss of precious lives in them,” he added.