5-year-old found dead in ditch a week after he went missing in Greater Noida

This marks the third incident of drowning involving a child in Gautam Buddha Nagar in February alone.

SHO Sharma said that most people living in the area are labourers and they step out every morning in search of work, while their children play and eat together on the premises of the nearby temple.

He added that multiple teams were formed to trace the child.

“We were alerted after locals saw his body floating in the ditch. We informed the family and sent the body for a post-mortem examination,” the SHO said.

On Monday, the child’s family was found grieving outside a post-mortem house in Noida’s Sector 94. His mother Ramshri said he went missing on February 17. She said they hail from Uttar Pradesh’s Farrukhabad and had shifted to Greater Noida’s Chipyana village two years ago in search of work. “He had been playing outside the temple along with other children of the village. When we returned home, we could not find him. We filed a missing person’s complaint the next day,” said the mother.

Earlier this month, in Greater Noida’s Dalelgarh village, a three-year-old boy drowned in a six-feet-deep flooded field, while a one-and-a-half-year-old girl died after falling in an open drain. These incidents were reported over a month after a 27-year old engineer drowned in water-filled pit in Noida Sector 150.