A 71-year-old widow, who was a pensioner and the lone earning member in the family that included an unemployed son and a daughter, is believed to have ended her life consuming bathroom cleaner at her home in Haridevpur on Thursday morning.

Police said Swapna Bhowmick’s son had been engaged in odd jobs and was unemployed for a long time because of the pandemic. Family members and neighbours have told the police that the family’s financial condition had driven the elderly woman to suicide.

Swapna used to live with her two unmarried children — Rabindranath, 51, and Ruma, 44 — in a rented apartment on the ground floor of a building on Bhuban Mohan Roy Road in Haridevpur.

The police said she was found whimpering in pain at the apartment on Thursday morning.

“Her son was the first to be alerted by the sound. He rushed in and found his mother lying on the floor. An open bottle of a bathroom cleaner was lying nearby. The woman was crying, her son told us,” said an officer of Haridevpur police station.

She was taken to Vidyasagar State General Hospital, where she died.

“We learnt during the investigation that she was very depressed because of the family’s financial conditions, and more so because her son became jobless during the pandemic,” the officer said.

“No suicide note has been found. It was apparent from the statement of the woman’s son and daughter that their financial conditions had driven her to suicide.”

In the recent past, a man who had lost job at a pharmaceutical company and was supplying polythene bags to grocery stores in the city had ended his life. A couple who had bought four-wheelers and given them out on rent to be used as app cabs had committed suicide last year as they were unable to repay the car loan.

More recently, a woman had committed suicide as she was apparently depressed because of inadequate income of her husband, whose salary was lesser than the monthly rent of their apartment.