Mystery Gas Leak in India Leaves at Least 11 Dead

[Anta Assamey]

A handout photo showing National Disaster Response Force personnel evacuating people after a gas leak on Sunday in the city of Ludhiana, India.National Disaster Response Force, via Associated Press

Officials had not yet been able to identify the gas or the source of the leak in the city of Ludhiana, in Punjab State.

At least 11 people were killed and almost as many were injured on Sunday after a gas leak in a city in the northern Indian state of Punjab. Officials sealed off a section of the city, Ludhiana, and evacuated hundreds of residents as they tried to identify the gas and the source of the leak.

All of the victims were found near three businesses in Ludhiana’s Giaspura industrial area — a dairy store, a grocery store and a clinic. Some lived in apartments above the storefronts. The area is home to clothing factories and the people who work there, including hundreds of migrant workers from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Dr. Hatinder Kaur of the Civil Hospital of Ludhiana, where the victims were taken and the injured were being treated, said preliminary investigations suggested that the victims’ nervous systems had been affected.

“Many of those who died were found unconscious in their homes,” she said.

Among the dead were three children — aged 9 to 16 — from the same family, local police officials said.

Rajinder Pal Kaur Chhina, a member of the local legislature, reached the scene about 30 minutes after the first reports started to spread on Sunday morning. She said she saw about a half-dozen people lying unconscious on the street near the dairy store.

“All these people had gone to buy milk,” Ms. Chhina said by phone. “We are trying to evacuate people from the neighboring areas.”

The Punjab government has deployed the National Disaster Response Force to assist with the evacuation, according to Surabhi Malik, the deputy commissioner of Ludhiana. The force is also extracting gas samples from sewers in the area to try to identify the gas, she said.

India’s president, Droupadi Murmu, responded to the news of the disaster on Twitter on Sunday, noting that women and children were among those killed and offering her condolences to the bereaved.

One of the world’s worst industrial disasters occurred in India in 1984, when a gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the central city of Bhopal killed thousands. Gas leaks have also taken a toll on the country in more recent years.

In 2020, a leak near a chemical plant in southern state of Andhra Pradesh killed 11 people and sickened hundreds. In 2017, around 200 children were hospitalized in New Delhi after a gas leak from a container left them unconscious and others with nausea and irritation in their eyes.