There is something quietly devastating about the way Baramdeo Pandit died — alone, high up on an electricity pole, in the middle of a Sunday night, trying to restore power to villages that probably didn’t even know he was out there.
The 57-year-old electrician, posted at the Mebo Power Sub-Station in Arunachal Pradesh’s East Siang district, was attending to a fault in a gang insulator at New Borguli when the shock hit him at around 9:18 pm on September 6. He fell. The burn injuries were severe. So was the head injury from the fall. He was rushed to Bakin Pertin General Hospital in Pasighat, but there was nothing doctors could do. Baramdeo Pandit was gone.
The insulator he was trying to fix supplied electricity to several villages in the Monggu Banggo area of Mebo subdivision — Seram, Kongkul, Namsing, Gadum, Mer, and more. On any given night, these are just names on a map. But for the families sitting in those homes, electricity is dinner being cooked, children doing homework, a fan running in the summer heat. Pandit had been the man who made all of that possible for decades. That’s the part that quietly stays with you.
He had first walked through the doors of the Power Department back in June 1988 — as a casual electrician, the entry-level kind, the kind people rarely look twice at. He was posted at New Borguli in 1991 and never left. Year after year, he maintained power supply across an area that is anything but easy to service. The Northeast’s terrain is unforgiving, the rains are relentless, and the infrastructure is stretched thin. But Pandit stayed put. In November 2023, after more than three decades, he was finally promoted to Work-Charged electrician. Thirty-five years to get a promotion. And he still showed up every day.
Junior Engineer Ajoy Pertin, who broke the news and spoke about the incident, described Pandit as someone who was punctual, dutiful, sincere — and, as he put it, a genuinely noble human being. Those aren’t the kinds of words people typically use for a colleague unless they mean them.
What makes this tragedy carry an extra weight is something Mebo MLA Oken Tayeng pointed out in his condolence message. Pandit had been living alone at New Borguli, far from his wife and five children — three sons and two daughters — back in Majilispur village in Bihar’s Vaishali district. He was doing what countless workers across India do quietly every day: staying away from home, from family, from the familiar, just to keep a job going. A job that, in his case, literally kept the lights on for others.
His mortal remains were sent back to Bihar on Monday afternoon. They reached his village on Tuesday evening. The family that waited for news must have been waiting a long time — not just for the body to arrive, but for the kind of recognition that a man like Baramdeo Pandit deserved while he was still alive.
Thirty-eight years of service, six villages powered, one Sunday night in September. The wires he fixed will carry electricity again. But the man who climbed that pole won’t be coming down.
