2 nurses, 5 neighbours: Meet the people who risked their lives to rescue the newborns

“I saw two nurses carrying a baby each, wrapped in bedsheets, in their hands. They were shouting for help,” he recalled.

A neighbour, Arunima Sharma, who runs a school, rushed down immediately on hearing the screams, he added.

“I took one of the newborns from the nurses while Arunima carried the other. We rushed to my Ford Endeavor, which I had parked near my house, and I turned the AC on. We kept the babies inside, hoping the AC would help them,” he said.

Sharma, 35, said she would never forget the faces of the two babies. “Their tiny faces had turned black because of the soot.”

The nurses told Narang and Sharma there were more newborns inside the burning hospital. “A couple on their scooter too saw the scene and stopped to help,” Narang said. “We rushed back.”

This is when, he recalled, the fire tenders started to arrive. Another neighbour had already made a call to the Police Control Room. Someone else had called the fire department at 11.32 pm.

By then, another neighbour, Inderdeep Singh, had joined them. These five people headed back with the two nurses to the rear entrance. Singh borrowed a ladder from a neighbour and used it to climb up to the window on the first floor.

“The window glass had already been broken… it opened right inside the neonatal room… The babies were right there in those small enclosures, wrapped in white cloth. The ventilators were shut. There was so much smoke inside that I couldn’t breathe… Some of them (babies) were crying. I picked them up one by one and handed them to the nurses and other neighbours standing next to the ladder,” Singh told The Indian Express.

“We put these babies inside the car too,” Narang added.

“Arunima and I then drove to a nearby nursing home in the area… but they refused to admit the babies. We pleaded for some time before rushing to the Advanced NICU hospital in Vivek Vihar. They took the babies,” Narang said.

It was around 11.45 pm that the fire tenders arrived. “We saw massive flames coming out from every side of the two-floor building. It was sandwiched between two bigger four-storey residential buildings. One team was immediately deployed to extinguish the fire while another team simultaneously tried to enter the building,” a firefighter said on condition of anonymity.

“The scale of the fire was such that it had started to engulf the neighbouring buildings and an electricity pole. Once we extinguished the flames, we entered from the front,” said the man.

Everything was charred inside. “There were half-burnt documents. The oxygen cylinders were lying burnt. The CCTV cameras too had been burnt. The walls were blackened by the fire… (medical) devices had burnt into a pile of charcoal,” he said.

“The staircase leading to the first floor was very narrow. We took the babies and shifted them out. The neighbours helping us had also taken out some babies”.

He said they didn’t know if the babies were alive or not. It was only later that they learnt six of them didn’t make it.