Eight persons were killed and eleven were injured when an under-construction four-storey building collapsed at Sahakar Nagar in Pune on Monday afternoon.
Most of the victims were construction wor-kers and their families and were living in the precarious structure. Pune Municipal Corp-oration (PMC) said that the building that stood on Taljai hillock been illegally built.
The deceased include six men, two women and one child. Three men, four women and four children were rescued from the rubble. However, they all have suffered major or minor injuries. Rescue operations continued till late into the night and at the time of going to press one person was still feared to be trapped in the debris.
The place where the incident took place has several illegal structures that have been haphazardly built. “The building was largely occupied by the construction workers and their families. Another family had rented out a different portion of the building. A team from the National Disaster Resp-onse Force equipped with rescue tools were pressed into service along with the fire-brigade,” Mahesh Pat-hak, municipal commissioner of Pune told this newspaper.