Dreams nipped in the bud, say kin of dead IAS aspirants

Tragic deaths of three civil services aspirants in Delhi due to flooding sparks protests and grief among families.

Parents and relatives struggled to come to terms with the sudden loss after three civil services aspirants drowned in the basement of a coaching centre, which was flooded due to heavy rain in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar area, on Saturday evening.

Several students staged a protest on Sunday in front of the building housing Rau’s IAS Study Circle after the deaths of Shreya Yadav, 25, from Uttar Pradesh, Tanya Soni, 21, from Bihar, and Nevin Delvin, 28, from Kerala. “The students died of government negligence,” one angry protester said.

Fear gripped Dharmendra Yadav, a professor at an engineering college in Ghaziabad, who was watching the events unfold on TV on Saturday. When frantic calls to his niece Shreya went unanswered, he rushed to the Old Rajender Nagar area, with the search tragically ending at the Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) hospital’s mortuary.   

Shreya had completed her B.Sc. in Agriculture at a college in Uttar Pradesh. Her father, a farmer, struggled to pay her fees and the extended family had pooled in money for her UPSC coaching, her uncle said.

“We sent her to Delhi and not Lucknow or Allahabad because of the environment, we thought the facilities here are better, she will be able to learn English. But look at what we have now? Everything we dreamed of is gone, who will take responsibility?” he asked.

Shreya’s elder brother is pursuing an MA degree in Journalism while her younger brother is in Class 8.

Navin Delvin was pursuing his Ph.D. in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and was also a UPSC aspirant. He was staying near his university and had gone to the library at the institute on Saturday evening, a relative said. His father is a retired Deputy Superintendent of Police based in Kerala and his mother is a Geography professor and head of the department (HoD) at a university.