Maharashtra: In a tragic incident, a 40-year-old employee of a leading IT company in Nagpur died of cardiac arrest in the washroom of the firm’s office. As per the police, the incident took place on Friday and the deceased has been identified as Nitin Edwin Michael, a senior analyst at HCL Technologies. This comes amid the social media storm over the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, a 26-year-old Chartered Accountant (CA) working at Ernst & Young in Pune.
An official from Sonegaon police station said the man was found unresponsive around 7 pm on Friday after he entered the washroom at the company’s office in the Mihan area.
His colleagues immediately took him to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Nagpur, where doctors declared him dead on arrival, according to the official, as quoted by news agency PTI.
“This is an unfortunate incident and a tragic loss. We extend our deepest condolences to the family of the deceased employee and are providing all possible assistance to them. In this incident, the employee was provided emergency support at the campus healthcare clinic and rushed to the hospital. The wellbeing of our people is of utmost priority and HCLTech provides healthcare programs for its all employees and their families, including on-campus clinics and annual preventive health checks,” an HCLTech spokesperson said
The Sonegaon Police have sent the body for a postmortem and registered a case of accidental death. Initial autopsy findings indicated that the man died of cardiac arrest, said a police official.
The police are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death. Michael is survived by his wife and their six-year-old son, as reported by the police.
Many corporate giants believe that Indians lack work ethics and need to overwork to attain the right skills. Billionaire Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys, famously said that Indians need to work at least 70 hours a week to make India a developed nation. Actor and BJP MP Kangana Ranaut also supported the idea of overwork and said that it should be “normalized.”
However, data suggests that overwork can not only have an impact on someone’s health; it can actually take one’s life too. In Japan, there is a specific term for death due to long working hours—karoshi. In 1969, the first case of Karoshi was recorded when an employee of a newspaper company in Japan died because of overwork, which led to stroke.
