A candlelight vigil in Bangalore after Susmita Chakravarti's suicide.
The wife of an employee of the troubled Kingfisher Airlines committed suicide around 1:30 this afternoon. The suicide note found in her south-west Delhi home said that her husband had not been paid for the last six months. She is also understood to be battling depression. She was found hanging from the ceiling by her neighbours and rushed to a local hospital, but didn't survive.
Susmita Chakravarti, 45, wrote a suicide note in Bengali, which says: "My husband and son are very caring and I love them. My husband works with Kingfisher where they have not paid him salary for the last six months. We are in acute financial crisis and so I am committing suicide". She also wrote that she feared her husband would lose his job.
Susmita's husband Manas Chakravarti is a store manager with Kingfisher Airlines. Police say that he called his wife on the phone from work but she didn't respond. Worried, he phoned his neighbours, who then broke down the door of the DDA flat when they too didn't hear anything from inside and found her hanging from the ceiling.
Mr Chakravarti retired from the Indian Air Force and joined Kingfisher after working in some other airilnes. They have an 18-year-old son, who is studying engineering in Assam.
Kingfisher has been grounded as all 270 of the debt-ridden company's engineers have been on strike since Sunday protesting against non-payment of salaries. The company announced a partial lockdown on Monday and has flown no flight since then. The lockdown has already been extended till October 12, since without engineers signing off on each flight for safety, the airline can't put any aircraft in the air.
Following the news of Mrs Chakravarti's suicide, Kingfisher employees held candlelight vigils in Mumbai and Bangalore this evening.
(With inputs from PTI)