‘How long will you make us wait?’: Family of man who drowned in Yamuna in Delhi

By evening, several relatives of Vikas had started losing patience. “Use a net… do anything! How long will you make us wait?”
asked one of the relatives as the divers continued to work.

Raghubir Singh, leading a team of divers, remained unmoved. “I’m doing my best here, please understand. The river is too full of trash to use a net. We’re working with limited resources,” he said. The relatives, exasperated, continued to argue until Singh turned his boat around and left.

Rahul tried hard to hold himself together. “I don’t blame them (the divers) for not being able to hold their breath under the filthy water. Locals have told me that there is a deep pit under the water, on the other side of the Nala. If the water was clean, the divers would have been able to spot him,” he said.

The NDRF has deployed three boats to comb through the waters with long iron rakes. The SDRF has deployed one boat, while the Delhi Boating Club divers have four boats of their own.

According to the divers’ in-charge, Harish Kumar, the distance between the Nala and the mouth of the Yamuna is not more than 1 km.

However, several issues slowed down the search operation. “The call first went to the UP Police since Kondli falls between the Delhi and Noida border,” explained Raghubir Singh, leading the team of five divers present on scene.

“The NDRF and SDRF did reach the place on time, but they used boats to look for the body. Boats move a lot of water when they move, it would have moved the body further downstream,” he said.

Singh further alleged that while the first call went to the NDRF at 8 pm on Saturday, the divers were only notified by 9:30 pm.

“In that one-and-half hours, the boats had circled the area several times. In cases like these, it’s difficult to estimate where the body has moved,” he said. The divers continued operations late into the night and had to pause around midnight due to poor visibility. The operations resumed at 6 am the following day.

The divers from the Delhi Boating Club too have faced a slew of challenges during the operation. “The water is extremely cold, the current is fast and the water levels are high,” explained one of them, adding, “Since the water is cold, the temperature will not let the body come to the river bed, if he has died. At this point, we believe that the body can only be retrieved once it bloats and rises to the surface.”