90 minutes of silence: When a living man was treated like a risk, not a life

Metal description: A young tech professional survived a 70-foot fall and was delayed nearly two hours before being rescued, but help never truly arrived. This isn’t just an accident; it’s a reflection of our collective indifference and a system that overlooks how to save lives.
At 12:30 AM on a cold, foggy night in India’s national capital region, 27-year-old Yuvraj Mehta was doing what lots of Indians do every day, returning home from work. He worked in a tech firm in Gurugram. His home was in Noida, and the road was familiar. The night was not supposed to be fatal.
Nearby his living area, in Sector 150, his car swung off the road. Bushy fog obscured the danger ahead. A deep brook flooded beside the road, its boundary wall broken, unfenced and forgotten. The car lurched into a about 70 feet underneath.
Yuvraj did not die on impact.
That circumstance alone vicissitudes everything.
He escaped the sinking vehicle. He climbed onto the roof. He called his father in an emergency, sharing his live location. He turned on his phone flashlight and shook it forcefully in the fog to signal he was alive, waiting, hoping, waiting for a response. For nearly two hours. Yuvraj waited to be rescued.
Police arrived at the scene. Fire brigade teams arrived. A crowd gathered. Officials were present, but no immediate action was taken. Onlookers said the rescuers were hesitant to enter the water for reasons that soon became clear: zero visibility, extreme cold, the presence of iron roads in the spit, and the personal risk of falling.
Ropes were laid, cranes were brought in, and ladders were arranged.
The issue of saving lives was discussed, but not immediately achieved.
Around 1:45 AM, a delivery worker did what no others from the organisation would do, and even tried. He knotted a robe around his waist and dove into the cold water. By then, Yuvraj Boys had faded. The phone’s light had faded.
His last words to his father were simple, heartbreaking, and most disturbing: “I don’t want to die.” A few hours later, his body was recovered.
The postmortem report states the cause of death as “asphyxia due to drowning, followed by cardiac arrest”. Simply say, his lungs bursting with water, and his heart failed.
What prepares the report not mentioned in apathy? Apathy that outstretched in slow motion, Minute by minute, although a living man hangs on to be treated as the cost of the risk.
Officials insist that every effort was made. Fog, darkness, and dangerous situations- these are all cited as explanations. But Yuvraj’s family, friends, and residents of the area tell a different story. They say Hole was not new. An accident had occurred before. Grievances had been lodged no barricades were erected. No notices were posted.
Negligence did not begin that night. It merely becomes fatal.
After Yuvraj’s death, the system acts rapidly. An FIR was filed. A junior engineer was fired. A show-cause notice has been raised against him. The CEO of the Noida Authority was fired. A special investigation team was formed to see the overall incident.
The urgency arrived- after life had left.
These raised a strange and very important question-
What’s the point of emergency services if two hours is not enough time to rescue a living person? When the police say they can’t swim, when rescuers say it’s too cold, when officials say visibility is poor, what should people rely on? And what is the point of emergency services?
On a delivery worker? On a passerby? Or on a luck? Has survival become a matter of being seen by the right person, rather than the right institution?
Well, 90 minutes is a long time. Too long to arrange divers. Long enough to attempt a rescue. Long enough to choose courage over caution if life is considered worth saving.
Yuvraj Mehta’s death is not just an accident, but it’s a failure of preparedness, accountability and empathy.
The real tragedy isn’t that he died. But that he was alive long enough to be rescued and wasn’t.
This should be a wake-up call, for the aim that tomorrow it could be any one of us- Going home, trusting the roads, trusting the system. Until the price of human life is compensated for, institutional fairness and administrative delay, this won’t be an exception; This will be a pattern.