Civic body's sanitary worker kills self

A 45-year-old sanitation worker of a municipal corporation here allegedly committed suicide by jumping in front of a speeding train near southwest Delhi's Badarpur area, police said today.
The deceased has been identified as Banwari Lal, who worked with the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) and resided at Madanpur Khadar area with his wife and four children, a police official said.
Lal's family has claimed that he took the extreme step as he was highly depressed for not being paid salary for the past five months. He had become a permanent employee in February 2014, they added.
However, SDMC refuted such allegations. "The charge that Banwari Lal committed suicide due to non-payment of salaries is not correct. In the entire SDMC, salaries are not held up in zones or the headquarters," SDMC's Director (Press and Information) Mukesh Yadav said.

"The SDMC employees normally get their salaries by 10th of every month in zones while those at the headquarters receive it earlier. The deceased employee might have been facing financial problems but it was not due to non-payment of salary to him," he added.
The incident was reported yesterday when Lal's body was found lying near railway tracks near Badarpur Border. Once he was identified, the police informed his family, who later told the police that Lal had left home early in the morning on the pretext of some urgent work, the police official said.
Later it also emerged that a few people had witnessed Lal sitting at the track for a long time on the railway track. But they did not assume that he would take such an extreme step, the official added.