Noida, Jan 18: An FIR has been lodged against two real estate firms in Greater Noida after a 27-year-old software engineer drowned when his car crashed into an unprotected, water-logged construction trench. The incident has sparked outrage among Sector 150 residents, who carried out a candle march Sunday evening to protest the persistent lack of safety infrastructure in the area.
Yuvraj Mehta was returning home from his Gurugram office when his car veered off the road in dense fog and fell into the deep pit intended for a building’s basement. While the police received word of the crash shortly after midnight on Saturday, a massive rescue operation involving the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) only succeeded in retrieving his body hours later.
“The FIR has been lodged against two real estate developers on the basis of the complaint,” ACP Hemant Upadhyay said regarding the legal action taken by the Knowledge Park station.
The victim’s family and local activists noted that the site was a known hazard. Raj Kumar Mehta, the victim’s father, mentioned that the Noida Authority had been warned multiple times about the dangerous, unlit stretch near the drain. Residents claimed that the absence of barricades made such a tragedy inevitable during the winter fog.
A delivery agent present at the scene alleged that the techie was alive and signaling for assistance for some time after the plunge. He criticized the official response, stating that the rescue teams were reluctant to enter the freezing water. “I was later told that if help had reached 10 minutes earlier, the techie could have been saved,” he directly said to reporters.
Additional Commissioner of Police Rajeev Narayan Mishra denied any negligence by the emergency services, stating that the extreme weather and zero visibility severely hampered the use of boats and cranes. He noted that an investigation is underway to determine the exact sequence of events.
Following the public outcry and the death of the young engineer, the local authority began installing reflectors and permanent barricading at the site on Sunday. The police have sent the body for a post-mortem examination as they continue to probe the developers’ role in the safety lapse.
