Why Yuvraj Mehta’s death was not an accident

On January 16, Yuvraj Mehta, a 27-year-old tech professional, was driving at night when his car veered off the road at a sharp turn and plunged into an unguarded, water-filled pit in Sector 150 of Greater Noida. His death has been described as a tragic accident caused by Noida Authority and builder negligence of safety norms at construction sites. That framing, however, leaves unresolved questions about responsibility and governance.

A governance problem

In urban India, deaths caused by infrastructural failure are seen as unfortunate and incidental. In reality, cities do not witness such deaths, they produce them. When unsafe infrastructure becomes ordinary, harm is no longer unexpected. Data (2023) from the National Crimes Record Bureau shows 1.73 lakh road accident deaths; urban areas account for about 32% of these, with higher per lakh rates than rural areas.

The language of “accident” implies uncertainty. In Indian cities, however, risks tied to neglected roads, exposed wiring, unguarded construction sites, flooded basements, and collapsing public utilities are well documented. Civic complaints and official audits have recorded these conditions for years. Findings from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs show that 70% of cities lack functional drainage audits, which helps explain why such risks go unaddressed.

Urban life is shaped by an everyday expectation that people adjust to risk. They slow down, choose routes carefully, avoid certain stretches during the monsoon, and learn to live with danger as routine. Over time, this shift places the burden of safety on individuals rather than institutions, even though the 74th Constitutional Amendment was meant to devolve urban governance, with only four of 18 functions effectively transferred.

This is not simply a failure of intention; it is a failure of priorities. Cities invest heavily in visible symbols of development, such as flyovers, expressways, and metro corridors. By contrast, the infrastructure that supports daily life draws far less attention. Footpaths, drainage networks, and electrical safety rarely attract urgency because they do not photograph well. Over time, this creates cities where everyday movement carries hidden risks.

This pattern becomes especially clear in places shaped by aspiration. In Delhi’s Karol Bagh, a dense coaching hub associated with educational mobility, repeated episodes of monsoon waterlogging have exposed the lethal consequences of infrastructural neglect. In 2024, three students drowned in a flooded basement library that had already been flagged by audits by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. These basement rooms, where students live and study, are illegal yet widely tolerated. So, these deaths, explained away as seasonal misfortune, are, in fact, the result of regulatory failure and administrative indifference.

What connects such cases to Mehta’s death is governance, which operates in similar ways across cities. Risks are known, violations are normalised, and responsibility is fragmented. Safety is consistently treated as secondary to speed, expansion, and appearance.

No accountability

When negligence leads to loss of life, responsibility disperses quickly, as multiple arms of the urban state enter the scene after the fact. Municipal bodies, public works departments, contractors, inspectors, and emergency services all appear in the aftermath. Each is responsible for a fragment of the system and none is accountable for the whole. In Mehta’s case, the Noida Authority was responsible for oversight of the construction site, while police and fire services delayed their response for nearly 90 minutes before the State Disaster Response Force handled recovery.

Committees are formed, inquiries are announced and junior officials are suspended, as seen in Noida. The performance of action takes the place of accountability, as reflected in recent cases flagged by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) where accountability has largely stopped at junior officials despite wider systemic failures.

Mehta’s case unsettles the belief, common in many cities, that education and professional status offer protection from everyday urban risk. In reality, vulnerability cuts across social and occupational categories. White-collar workers working extended hours and students living in basements and preparing for competitive exams navigate the same unsafe urban environments.

Negligent infrastructure rarely provokes sustained moral outrage because responsibility has no clear face. Instead, harm takes shape gradually, as repairs are delayed, inspections are missed, and small administrative failures are allowed to pile up.

Public grief is real, but it often settles quickly into expressions of sorrow and promises of inquiry. In the Noida case, the government has ordered re-inspections of construction sites. Without deeper change, mourning turns into a ritual that absorbs failure rather than questioning it. Deaths like these need to be understood as political events, rooted in governance choices that favour visible development while safety recedes into the background.

The way forward demands three concrete steps: RTI-mandated urban risk registers linking citizen complaints to 30-day mitigation deadlines, quarterly CAG-style audits of preventable urban deaths with ministerial accountability, and independent urban safety commissions empowered under the 74th Amendment to enforce binding standards across States and municipalities.

Rahul Verma, Independent researcher and sociology educator

Published – February 18, 2026 12:16 am IST