A rickshaw-puller who sought shelter from rain under a canopy of trees in Golf Green was killed when one of them and a portion of another crashed on him.

A huge branch of a rain tree (Samanea saman), called shirish in Bengali, and a neem tree (Azadirachta indica) fell on the rickshaw in which Alok Kayal, 42, was seated around 7.30am, police said. The rickshaw and Kayal were crushed under the combined mass, which a veteran horticulturist put at around 2 tonnes (2,000kg).

Kayal, a resident of Canning in South 24-Parganas, was declared “brought dead” at MR Bangur Hospital, said an officer at Golf Green police station.

A senior horticulturist said scientific pruning of the rain tree could have averted the accident.

The incident occurred just outside the boundary wall of Central Park in Golf Green, a 10-minute walk from the Doordarshan TV tower.

“It was raining in the morning. But it was just light rain. There was hardly any wind. The whole thing happened in a flash,” the officer said, quoting eyewitness accounts. The onlookers were surprised at the suddenness of the incident.

A contractor hired by the civic body to clean the area said it appeared that a branch of the rain tree fell on the smaller neem tree. “The neem tree was smaller and could not bear the weight of the branch,” he said.

Metro sent pictures of the uprooted tree and branches to Sushanta Ganguly, a horticulturist who retired from the KMC in 2022. He echoed the contractor. “The rain tree seems much larger than the neem tree,” he said.

Scientific and regular pruning of the bigger tree could have saved Kayal’s life, he said.

“The canopy of the rain tree was not balanced. It was unevenly loaded on one side. The branch fell from that side. Had the tree been pruned scientifically, the branch would not have crashed,” said Ganguly.

In Calcutta, it does not take heavy rain or a storm to fell a tree. On June 19 morning, a banyan tree on a pavement along Sarat Bose Road came crashing down, crippling traffic for hours. It was bone dry then.

The area where the tree fell is in Ward 95 of the KMC. The councillor, Tapan Dasgupta, acknowledged the lack of maintenance of trees in Golf Green.

“The area is full of trees. Some of them are very old. But something like this happened, to my knowledge, for the first time in my ward,” he said.

“I attended a borough meeting after the incident. I proposed that a team of experts visit Golf Green and supervise the maintenance of trees.”