A mother of two jumped in front of a moving incident in Salem area of Tamil Nadu hoping that she would get compensation for the children if she committed suicide.
Reports said that 39-year-old Papapathy from Salem Mulluvadiket ran in front of the speeding bus in Salem hoping that her children could pay their college fees with the compensation that the Government would pay for her death.
Mother to two children, Papathy was working as a contract cleaner at the Salem District Collectorate on a monthly salary of Rs 10,000 after being separted from her husband 15 years ago.
Papathi has been taking care of her two children and her elderly mother.
Papathi was not in a position to pay tuition fees for her daughter, who was studying in the third year of EC, E in a private engineering college, and for her son, who was studying in the first year of architecture in a private polytechnic college.
With his monthly income barely meeting the family’s daily needs, Papathi pondered how to pay the tuition fees. “She has not gone to her work for 3 days and sought loan from everyone she knew,” reports said.
A CCTV footage from the area has gone viral. The footage shows that Papathi had run away on his own and jumped in front of the bus, so the police started further investigation.
Despite becoming the one of the largest economies in the world, India continues to have the largest concentration of the world’s poor, estimated at 159.8 million to 192.8 million people in 2020 using the international poverty line of PPP $2.15 a day as per a World Bank report (PPP stands for purchasing power parity).
Though poverty has always been a major problem in the country, the situation has worsened according to World Bank after Covid 19. Out of 7 crore people globally who became poor that year due to economic losses caused by the pandemic, Indians accounted for 5.6 crore, as per the World Bank.