A 45-year-old HDFC Bank employee died under suspicious circumstances after falling off a chair at her office in Lucknow on Tuesday, police said, amid uproar over the death of Ernst & Young employee Anna Sebastian allegedly due to work pressure. Sadaf Fatima worked as the additional deputy vice-president at the bank. Terming the incident "worrying", Samajwadi Party Chief Akhilesh Yadav said "such news is an indication of the economic pressure in the country".
Sadaf's co-workers have alleged that she was under work pressure. "The cause of death will be clear after the postmortem," Vibhutikhand ACP Radharaman Singh said.
Akhilesh asked all companies and government departments to "think seriously" in this regard. "This is an irreparable loss of the country's human resources," Akhilesh said in a post on X.
"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 it is how mentally free, healthy and happy a person is," he added.
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The death of Anna Sebastian has led to a debate about work culture. In a letter to the EY India chairperson, Anna's mother, Anita Augustine, detailed her "overwhelming workload" and said that Anna "worked late into the night, even on weekends. Recently, a software engineer allegedly electrocuted himself to death due to work pressue.
The SP leader attacked the BJP government over its economic policies and said 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 demoralise the public," he said, adding, "To overcome this problem, companies and government departments should make active and meaningful efforts for 'immediate improvement'."