Fatehabad lineman loses hand as utility staff fail to de-energize line: another death by deferred safety protocol

In Fatehabad, Haryana, an assistant lineman named Pankaj Kumar climbed a transformer on May 11 after a shift attendant assured him the line was shut. It was not. He took a shock that cost him his right hand up to the elbow. Police have filed a case against the shift attendant and another lineman.^[1]

This is not an isolated accident. In September 2025, a helper named Joni was electrocuted in the same district when lineman Gurpreet Singh told him the line was permitted off and sent him up a pole with power still live.^[4] In November 2025, Basant Kumar, a 51-year-old worker with a rod in his leg from a prior fall, was sent onto a live line and killed.^[5] In a separate incident, a worker died when a lineman mistakenly directed him to the wrong line.^[3]

Each of these deaths follows the same script: a worker on the ground trusts a verbal clearance, the control room or lineman fails to verify de-energization, and the line stays hot. The utility's own staff become the victims of its broken safety culture. In every case, families accuse the corporation of negligence. In every case, the response is an FIR, an arrest, and then bail.

India's Electricity Act, 2003, requires licensees to maintain their works in a condition safe to persons and property.^[6] But the gap between the law and the ground is measured in bodies. The mechanism that should prevent these deaths, positive isolation, visible grounding, independent verification of zero potential before work begins, is absent or unenforced. The cost of implementing it is trivial compared to the compensation payouts and the lost working years.

Who wins when safety budgets are cut? The utility's bottom line, in the short term. Who pays? The workers who climb the poles, and the families who bury them. The concrete alternative is a mandatory, audited lockout-tagout protocol with GPS-tagged ground sets and a real-time dashboard visible to control room operators and field crews alike. Until the utility is required to prove the line is dead, not just say so, more linemen will die.