One worker died and two others were injured on Monday when a boulder fell in an under-construction tunnel of Sevoke-Rangpo rail link.
With this death, the total number of lives lost since work on this project started in 2017 is now 10.
The Rs 4,000 crore project aims to link the landlocked border state of Sikkim with the rest of the country through railways.
Sources said that Shankar Barman, 22, a resident of Cooch Behar, was killed in tunnel 10 when a boulder fell and hit the excavator he was using for stone cutting at around 10am on Monday morning.
Deepak Singh, 35, of Bihar, and Shekar Tudu, 54, of Jharkhand suffered injuries.
“The driver died when a boulder fell and hit the excavator in the tunnel. Tunnels 8 and 10 are turning out to be the most difficult to work given the nature of the rock in the area. Only 500 metres of digging is getting done in these tunnels in 24 hours,” said a source.
Tunnel 10 is situated at Bhalu Khola, along the Sikkim-Bengal border, some 25km from Kalimpong district headquarters. The tunnel, around 5km long, is among the longest in the project connecting Bhalu Khola and Tar Khola in Kalimpong district.
Rescue operations inside the tunnel
The 45km Sevoke-Rangpo railway consists of 14 tunnels, 17 bridges and five railway stations. Around 84 per cent of the rail link passes through tunnels that are 8 metres in diameter.
Actual work on the project started in 2017, but it was flagged off in 2009 when Mamata Banerjee was the Union railway minister.
On July 30, 2021, five persons died when the Mamkhola rivulet swelled amid incessant rain and swept away tents in which workers were sleeping near the construction site.
On June 17, 2021, a big rock crashed on labourers intunnel 10, killing two of them and injuring five.
Designers from Switzerland’s AMBERG Engineering and the US-based AECOM along with D2 Consults PEMS, from Austria are involved in this project.
Two fault lines are also located in the area. Their exact locations had been mapped and identified, an engineer involved in the project earlier said.
