Noida: Dadri MLA Tejpal Nagar has written to chief minister Yogi Adityanath seeking the deployment of a State or National Disaster Response Force unit in Noida, citing lapses exposed by the recent death of a software engineer in Sector 150. He said he had earlier warned officials about poor road conditions in the sector, but no action was taken.Nagar alleged that failures by the Noida Authority and the fire and disaster management departments highlighted serious gaps in emergency preparedness. In his letter, Nagar referred to the Jan 16 incident where Yuvraj Mehta, a software engineer and resident of Greater Noida, died after his car plunged into a waterlogged construction site in the sector. He told TOI that he had written to the district magistrate and the Noida Authority in Sept last year, and again on Jan 12, days before the incident, flagging the poor condition of roads in the area, but no action was taken.“During my visits to Sector 150 to meet the public, people often approached me with issues in the sector, especially the poor roads, broken drains, and empty dug-up plots in the area posing a safety hazard. Taking their complaints into account, as a public representative, I wrote to the Authority several times, asking them to fix the issues as soon as possible. However, no action was taken by any official, leading to the loss of life,” the MLA said.The letters sent earlier by the MLA were also mentioned in the letter to the CM.Calling the incident avoidable, he MLA sought a thorough inquiry and strict action against officials found responsible, and pointed out the need for the city to have its own units for relief and rescue response for such incidents.“We saw that the district had to be dependent on another district for relief and rescue response. SDRF and NDRF teams had to come from Ghaziabad, which led to logistical delays. This calls for a separate unit of such teams in Greater Noida as well,” Nagar said.
