Ludhiana, April 20 (IANS) Seven members of a family, comprising five children, were burnt to death in a fire that broke out in their hut in a slum in this Punjab industrial city on Wednesday morning, police said.
One member of the family, who was not in the hut at the time of the incident, has survived.
The cause of the fire could be a fire spark from a nearby massive municipal garbage dump that has been under fire for the past few days, a police official said.
Assistant Commissioner of Police (East) Ludhiana Surinder Singh said they were migrant labourers from Bihar and were sleeping when the incident occurred.
Regretting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to cancel his scheduled visit to Ferozepur midway, Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi said on Wednesday that there was no security lapse that led to the cancellation of the Prime Ministers visit to the bordering town.
Holding the Punjab government squarely responsible for the "gross security lapse" during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Punjab, that eventually led to cancellation of all his programmes, former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Wednesday demanded dismissal of the government and imposition of President's rule.
With the spike in Covid-19 cases, Punjab on Tuesday imposed statewide night curfew daily from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and ordered closure of all educational institutions till January 15.
The accused, identified as Ashish Kumar, tied his wife Ranjan Devi and son Vaibhav to the bed and set them on fire at his house in Mayurwa locality, which comes under the Triveniganj police station.
Nearly 100 students and resident doctors of the Government Medical College in Patiala in Punjab have tested positive for Covid-19, officials said on Tuesday. A retirement party and New Year Eve's party held on the college campus without following appropriate Covid-19 behaviour is blamed for alarming spike in the cases.
With 192 new cases of highly transmissible Covid variant Omicron detected in the last 24 hours, India's Omicron tally on Tuesday rose to 1,892 cases. Maharashtra and Delhi continue to be the worst-hit states with this new variant.
