Noida: Five hit-and-run cases in city left 4 dead in 6 months, no arrests yet

A mother-daughter duo, waiting for an auto-rickshaw under the Sector 37 flyover in Noida, run over by a car on September 20. The car also hits the woman’s husband. Status:accused identified but not arrested
A rickshaw-puller hit by a Mahindra XUV near Electronic City metro station for asking the driver to drive slowly. Status: Car owner and driver identified but no arrests so far
CCTV footage of an August 11 hit-and-run incident goes viral after an ambulance is hit by a “speeding” four-wheeler on the Yamuna Expressway leaving two injured. Status: No headway in the case
Noida: In the last six months, at least four people were killed and three others injured in as many as five hit-and-run cases reported across Noida but not a single arrest have been made in the cases despite the identification of the accused or the vehicle in some. While police claim a mix of issues -- lack of CCTV cameras, grainy videos and manpower crunch, delayed investigation in the cases, experts and social workers say “corruption” and “pressure games” could be at the root of the matter. Justice, meanwhile, continues to evade family members of victims.
Identification of a vehicle involved in a hit-and-run case, additional commissioner of police(law and order) Love Kumar says, “takes time”, especially if there are no CCTV cameras near the crime spot to rely on. “Once the vehicle is identified, then we trace the accused and produce them before the court,” he said.
Currently, red light violation detection (RLVD) cameras are operational at just three traffic intersections -- Sectors 57, 31/25, Noida stadium, besides the Noida Elevated Road in Gautam Budh Nagar, DCP (traffic) Ganesh Saha told TOI. Additionally, the Yamuna Expressway and the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway have 10 and 178 CCTVs, respectively, for recording violations and surveillance.
In January, the Uttar Pradesh government had sanctioned Rs 25 crore for 250 new CCTV cameras and other high-tech equipment for GB Nagar under the ‘Safe City’ project but these are yet to be installed. DCP (Greater Noida) Abhishek Jha, who is the nodal officer for the project for the district police, says during a preliminary assessment around 700 locations had been identified for installation of 1,500 to 1,600 cameras. “A proposal has been sent to the state government. A consultant will be hired to arrive at the exact locations. It is a long process,” he adds.Victims’ kin, however, says that police have been slow to act even when there was crucial evidence. Seema, sister of now-bedridden rickshaw-puller Dileep Kumar, says an FIR had been filed at Phase III after the police were provided with the registration number (UP16CM8818) of the Mahindra XUV that had hit the 45-year-old. “No arrests have been made in the case yet. A policeman had come to our house with the (accused) father-son duo. The father admitted that his son was behind the wheels of the car but yet nothing has moved in the case,” she tells TOI.
With Kumar, the only breadwinner of the family, out of job his two teenaged children are now staring at an uncertain future, Seema adds.
In the September 20 incident, too, family members of the deceased Neeraj Sharma (46) and Anjali Sharma (19) say the police had been able to identify the accused as Amit Chauhan, a businessman from the Gijhore area. “Due to media spotlight on the case, the vehicle used in the crime was identified as a Scorpio car in no time. Police even traced the house and the factory of the accused to Sector 88. However, no arrests have been made in the case, so far,” Sharma’s nephew Anoop says, adding that his uncle Ramkaran, who had sustained major injuries in the incident, was still recuperating.
Police have also not been able to make arrests in an August 11 hit-and-run incident on the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway, which is equipped with a series of CCTV cameras. Arihant Jain, a renal patient, and his daughter sustained injuries when a Fortuner car had rammed into the ambulance in which the former was being transported from Bulandshahr’s Sikandrabad to Delhi. A CCTV video had gone viral on social media but no arrests have been made since.
According to additional DCP (Noida) Ranvijay Singh, in most cases, the investigation “suffers because of lack of evidence”. “In the September 20 case, we managed to identify the accused, Amit Chauhan, but he fled his house with his entire family before we could arrest him,” Singh says, adding that there were also cases where investigation got delayed due to grainy footage from CCTV cameras or complete lack of one.
In a June 18 hit-and-run incident, BHEL employee Prabal Kumar (36) had died after a Fortuner car allegedly ploughed into his Royal Enfield bike just outside Amrapali’s Sapphire housing society, a few metres from a police chowki. Days after his death due to excessive blood loss and multiple fractures, his family members told TOI that cops had obtained CCTV footage of the incident from an outlet near the spot and a few others. “We shared some CCTV footage from our society and the police, too, obtained CCTV footage from an outlet near the spot. However, the footage was unclear and the accused could not be identified in the same. Since then, the investigation in the case is stuck,” Prabal’s father Om Prakash says.
Unlike its counterpart in Gurgaon, which has been taking extensive help from manufacturers and dealers of vehicles -- sharing broken parts of vehicles involved in a crime found at the spot – the GB Nagar Police is yet to rope in such experts. “A part of the bumper of the Fortuner car, damaged in the incident, was found lying at the crime spot. Cops had said that they will approach the manufacturers and dealers for help in getting the vehicle identified but did nothing,” Jitendra Singh, one of Prabal’s friends, tells TOI. The same car, the victim’s friend claims, had been spotted by the Amity police chowki that day, too, but the local police are “yet to identify it”.
The accused in a six-month-old hit-and-run case, where a 27-year-old food delivery executive, Satyavir, died after his bike was knocked down by a four-wheeler at Sector 16-3/4 intersection, also remains to be identified. The victim’s brother-in-law Satyendra Kumar tells TOI that after the April 8 incident, the family was unable to make rounds of the police station and, so far, they have not heard from the police.
‘Not overwork but corruption behind delay’
According to former Uttar Pradesh director general of police (DGP) Vikram Singh, working out a hit-and-run case depended more on the “will and honesty of the officer concerned” as these cases actually see maximum corruption. “Where there is a will there is a way, but you must not overlook the fact that hit-and-run cases are actually the ones which involve the maximum corruption. The investigation here gets delayed not because of overwork, but corruption. If CCTV footage is not there, police can easily locate an accused through the kabadis (scrap dealers). Every second kabadiwala is actually an informer of the police, so no vehicle involved in an accident can go unnoticed. If the police want, a hit-and-run case can be worked out within 24 hours. But such a case can actually translate into lakhs of rupees for the corrupt and inefficient,” Singh said. “During my tenure, I have seen how even in smaller districts, like Bijnor and Moradabad, efficient officers pursued cases thoroughly and did not leave a single case unsolved.”
Singh was the DGP of UP between June 2007 and September 2009. He retired from the IPS in May 2010.
For Anurag Kulshreshtha, president of NGO TRAX that works for road safety, hit-and-run cases were all about pressure games. “In a hit-and-run case, probe generally doesn’t move forward as there is less media pressure in accident cases. Police also lose interest in such investigations. But if multiple CCTV camera footage is checked, the vehicle involved in the crime can definitely be identified,” he says, adding that rampant traffic violations and infrastructure design failure made most intersections in GB Nagar vulnerable. In 2020, the traffic department had identified Mahamaya flyover-Yamuna Expressway, National Highway 9 Chowki near National Institute of Biologicals (NIB), the road opposite Uflex Company in Sector 60, Morna bus stand, Adobe intersection, Chhaprauli-Expressway intersection and Sector 12/22 intersection among the 33 accident ‘black' spots across the district. Black spots are areas from which recurring instances of accidents are reported.
While the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not maintain separate data of hit-and-run incidents for the district as it is not a metropolitan city, the district’s traffic police records show in 2020 as many as 745 road accidents were reported across GB Nagar which left 380 people dead and 528 others injured.Recently, there has been a demand for a Gurgaon-like dedicated Accident Response Team (ART) to tackle such cases, additional DCP (Noida) Singh said lack of manpower had made it difficult for the GB Nagar police to set up special units for a particular type of crime. TOI had last month reported how a five-member ART, comprising Gurugram Police personnel who had undergone extensive training in scanning CCTV footage, had cracked 15 “blind” hit-and-run cases in six months.