Opinion In Noida death, faltering of the city’s promise
The postmortem points to the brutal aftermath of a civic failure built up over years of warnings ignored, prior accidents forgotten and responsibility deferred.
If a city built as a poster child of development cannot protect its citizens as they go about their daily work and play, its promise is already betrayed. What makes a city a home? At its most basic, this would include, not necessarily in that order, economic opportunities, assurance of security, community. For 27-year-old technology professional Yuvraj Mehta, Noida was that place until Friday, when driving home to Sector 150, his SUV veered off course in the dense fog and into a deep construction pit full of water. Even though rescue teams responded within minutes of his call to his father, lack of requisite infrastructure became the impediment: Mehta died over two hours later, still calling for help. The postmortem points to the brutal aftermath of a civic failure built up over years of warnings ignored, prior accidents forgotten and responsibility deferred.
Conceived in 1976 as an industrial township, an absence shapes the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority’s governance architecture: It is run by a state-appointed development authority and not by an elected municipal corporation, insulating it from public accountability. Ringed by expressways and IT parks, with a budget of nearly Rs 8,800 crore for the 2025-26 fiscal year, Noida has, over the years, been projected as a symbol of India’s urban future. But the technocratic model has never meaningfully translated into an imagination of a lived city. When grave lapses occur, as it did in Mehta’s case, there are transfers, suspensions and inquiries, while the underlying structure remains unchanged. In the days following the tragedy, this is again in evidence: The Noida Authority CEO has been removed and put on a “wait list”, FIRs registered against two real-estate companies, and an SIT constituted to probe the circumstances of the fatality. But the Supreme Court’s suggestion last August that the state government consider converting the Noida Authority into a municipal corporation has seen little movement.
From the contamination of tap water in Indore earlier this month to the Gambhira bridge collapse in Vadodara last year, urban governance in India is riddled with blind spots, let down by corruption and abdication. Mehta’s death exposes the fragile foundations of the infrastructure-led imagination of a viksit Bharat, teeming with “smart” cities. If a city built as a poster child of development cannot protect its citizens as they go about their daily work and play, its promise is already betrayed.
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