In a strange incident, a 45-year-old woman employee, Sadaf Fatima, died under mysterious circumstances at HDFC Bank in Lucknow. Reports said that she fell off her chair and died on the spot. The local police have initiated an investigation in this regard.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Radharaman Singh confirmed the situation by saying,
“The panchnama about the observation of her body has been filled, and it has gone for post-mortem. The cause of death would be ascertained after the examination.”
This incident has brought an uneasy feeling among the people because this comes at a time when debates on workplace stress and its consequences on mental health are already underway.
Colleagues said that Fatima had recently been taking a lot of stress from work. The sentiment resonates too well with people in Japan, where an employee of Ernst and Young died earlier this year, reportedly due to overwork.
SP chief Akhilesh Yadav termed the incident “extremely worrying” and said it reflected the country’s economic pressures. He called upon companies and government departments to rethink their priorities and working conditions:
“This is an irreparable loss of the country’s human resources. Such sudden deaths bring working conditions into question.”
Yadav said true progress does not lie in empirical evidence, such as economic indicators, but in people’s sound minds and happiness.
This has similarities with the case of Anna Sebastian, 26 years old, too, working for Ernst and Young’s Pune office, who died back in July. Her mother has written to EY India Chairman Rajiv Memani about how overwork is glorified within the company. Sometime back, Anna had raised her concern about work pressure with her superiors, and a relook into the workplace practices is long overdue.
