Anil’s parents claim that ‘wife’ Rani is doing all this for money, landlord Rammo confirms they lived together and ‘considered themselves married’.
New Delhi: First came the heart-warming story that Twitter users had raised Rs 57 lakh for the family of sewage worker Anil, who died due to asphyxiation last week. Then came the twist.
Now, new claimants have emerged for the funds, who say that the original beneficiary — Anil’s wife Rani — isn’t his wife at all.
ABP Live reported Thursday that Anil’s parents claimed Rani is, in fact, his maternal aunt, not his wife.
“Rani is my sister. She was never married to Anil. My son has never married at all. She is posing as his wife and doing all this for money,” Anil’s mother said.
The parents also said the boy in the picture sobbing next to Anil’s body that went viral on social media was not his son — he had no children.
ThePrint reached out to Anil and Rani’s landlord Rammo, who confirmed that Anil was not legally married to Rani, but was her nephew who was living with her. The two “considered themselves married”.
The ‘son’ sobbing in the picture is “one of Rani’s three children”, said Rammo.
Also read: Sewage worker deaths wouldn’t happen if India worked as hard on it as it did for polio
According to Rammo, Rani married a man and then ran away to live with his brother Manohar Lal. Manohar Lal fled to Mumbai, after which Anil started living with Rani and her three children. Rammo said it was unclear who had fathered the three children.
On her relationship with Anil, Rammo said: “They both had an affair and bore another child, who died recently due to pneumonia. Everyone considered them to be married.”
Rammo also said that Anil had become a father figure for the children and they started calling him “Papa”.
‘How will we survive now?’
Anil, 37, died last Friday while cleaning a Delhi Jal Board (DJB) sewer in west Delhi’s Dabri, as reported by The Hindustan Times.
He was privately hired by a nearby resident, Satbir Kala, who did not provide him any protective gear. The report said that Anil was survived by ‘wife’ Rani and ‘his’ three children.
The picture of his ‘son’ produced an outpouring of sympathy — Twitter users transferred money to Rani’s bank account and also contributed to the Ketto fundraising campaign in her name.
Also read: Twitter users raise Rs 24 lakh for family of deceased Delhi sewage worker
However, now Anil’s parents have objected to Rani’s claim on the funds. Anil’s father told ABP: “I have eight children and Anil was the only earning member of our family. He used to give us some money. How will we survive now?”