Ludhiana: The family members of fire-fighters who had died in a building collapse incident in November 2017 paid tributes to the departed souls on Sunday by organising a ‘path’ and langar at Suffian chowk, where the incident had happened.
The incident had taken place on November 20, 2017, but families selected Sunday for paying tributes. The family members were a little bit disappointed when mayor Balkar Sandhu and MC commissioner Pardeep Sabharwal could not attend the programme.
In this incident 9 fire-fighters had lost their lives when the building had collapsed during the fire incident. The families of eight fire fighters had gathered at the spot for organising the ‘path’. Earlier, the family members were planning to organise it at the central fire station, but then they decided to organise the same at the spot where the incident had happened.
Manjit Kaur, wife of a deceased sub-fire officer Rajkumar, said, “Through this ‘path’ we remembered those brave fire-fighters who lost their lives while performing their duty. We selected this spot where we had lost them and once we reached here all those bad memories were once again fresh in our minds.” She said the joint commissioner, Kulpreet Singh, area councillor Gurdeep Neetu and even MLA Surinder Dawar had come to the spot but the mayor and commissioner gave the programme a miss. She said they should have come as the families of the departed souls would also have felt nice.
Malkit Singh, father of deceased fire-man Manpreet Singh, said perhaps they did not turn up because families would have asked about the jobs and other benefits which were still pending. He said they had organised any such thing after three years but still the authorities did not come for five minutes.
Earlier, the families had shown resentment for not getting the benefits even after getting the gallantry award and kin of three fire-fighters are yet to get jobs on compassionate grounds.