Woman worker gets stuck in knitting machine, dies

Tirupur: A 20-year-old woman worker was killed after she got stuck in a fabric knitting machine in a private company at Chinnakarai near Palladam here on Wednesday. The Palladam police have booked her employer, Jayakumar, for neglecting safety measures.
The deceased was identified as A Bhuvaneswari of Kullivalam in Trichy. A school dropout, she joined the private knitting company as a temporary worker hardly 20 days ago.

According to police, the company has 10 women labourers and one man who work in shifts round the clock. Bhuvaneswari, they added, was one of the three women labourers assigned to night shift on Tuesday. While Bhuvaneswari was handling the machine from top, the other two were stationed below.

Around 2am, she tried to regulate the machine but it seem like she pressed the wrong switch by mistake. As the machine came to a grinding halt, the other two came up but only to find Bhuvaneswari dead after stuck in the machine, the police said.

Preliminary investigations revealed that her head was stuck between iron rollers. "Only after postmortem we can ascertain the real reason for her death," the police added.

Bhuvaneswari is survived by her parents, who are daily wagers, and a college-going sister and a school-going brother.

After the postmortem at the Tirupur government hospital, her body was handed over to her family.