Lucknow Woman Dies After Falling Off Chair In Office, Her Colleagues Say She Was Under Work Stress

Days after the death of a Pune employee due to work pressure caught the attention of the government, a Lucknow woman fell off her chair in the office and died. Her colleagues told Dainik Bhaskar that she was under work pressure.

The incident happened on Tuesday and the woman was identified as Sadaf Fatima, who worked at HDFC Bank. She was posted as Additional Deputy Vice-President at HDFC Bank’s Vibuti Khand branch in Gomtinagar, a report with the publication stated.

On September 24, Sadaf fell off her chair while working in the office. She was rushed to a hospital, where she was declared dead. Her body was later sent for a postmortem, it said.

In an X post, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav termed the incident “worrying” and said it was “a symbol of the current economic pressure in the country”.

“All companies and government departments will have to think seriously in this regard. This is an irreparable loss of the country’s human resources. Such sudden deaths bring the working conditions under question. The real measure of the progress of any country is not the increase in the figures of services or products but how mentally free, healthy and happy a person is,” a rough translation of Akhilesh Yadav’s post in Hindi suggested.

The Samajwadi Party chief also slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and alleged the economic policies of the country had failed.

“Due to the failed economic policies of the BJP government, the business of companies has reduced so much that to save their business, they make fewer people do many times more work. The BJP government is as much responsible for such sudden deaths as the statements of BJP leaders that mentally demoralize the public,” he tweeted.

“To overcome this problem, companies and government departments should make active and meaningful efforts for ‘immediate improvement’,” his post read.

In July this year, a woman chartered accountant, identified as 26-year-old Anna Sebastian Perayil, died due to work stress, merely four months into joining Ernst & Young (EY), a firm in Pune. Following her death, Sebastian’s mother, in September, wrote to EY India chairman, Rajiv Memani, alleging that the workload and extended working hours took a toll on her daughter. The firm, however, denied the allegations.

Union Minister for Labour Mansukh Mandaviya had recently said Perayil’s case is being probed.