New Delhi:
Two people were killed, and several others were injured after a fire broke out around 11 am in a building in Noida’s Sector 66 on Wednesday. Officials said the blaze started when an electric bike, being charged in the basement, exploded and set several parked vehicles alight.
Weeks earlier, 15 people were killed in Lucknow’s Aliganj, in a building sanctioned as residential but repurposed into a coaching centre with only one staircase out. Before that, 23 people, most of them foreign nationals, died in Delhi’s Hauz Rani, in a guesthouse packed with four times the rooms it was licensed for, with a single entry and exit point.
These people will remain names in a file, data points in a compliance report, a cautionary tale repeated until the next one. For their families, they were everything.
It is hard to comprehend what happens the moment someone you love becomes one of those names. NDTV spoke to two sisters for whom that moment arrived without warning, on an ordinary Wednesday, in the form of a phone call from a police station they didn’t know existed until it did.
The phone rang a little past 4 pm. Mona (name changed), 23, picked up expecting nothing in particular. It was Sector 71 Phase 3 police station.
One call became two. Two became ten. The network kept cutting the officer’s voice into static, forcing him to call back each time to finish what he’d started saying. Mona’s voice broke too, but not because of bad signal. Somewhere between the third call and the tenth, what she was hearing finally landed, and her voice gave way.
Her friend was in a fire, she was told.
Then came a photograph. A face burned beyond recognition. The only thing she recognised was a locket, the one he never took off.
He was under treatment, they told her. Since her number was the last one on his phone, the police asked her to come to the station.
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“All I was praying through that cab ride was that he’d still be alive,” her elder sister, the only guardian she has in Delhi, told NDTV.
The cab ride felt endless. When the two sisters finally reached the station, a female staffer met them at the door. She offered them water and hope that the person they knew, bright and full of plans, was still fighting somewhere under treatment.
She tried to make small talk while they waited. Asked what he did for work, how they knew him. But when the sisters asked again, about his condition this time, a woman constable told them plainly: he was gone.
“I could not believe it. I kept texting him on WhatsApp; the messages didn’t get delivered,” Mona told NDTV. “He never used to ignore my messages.”
His body had been found around 3 pm. The man they knew as their friend was Rishabh Singh, 27, a software engineer who had moved to Noida barely two weeks earlier. He lived in a paying-guest room inside the building. His work was hybrid, ten days a month in the city, the rest from his hometown in Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh. He was the eldest in his family, and the only one earning. He leaves behind his parents and a younger sister.
Rishabh Singh moved to Noida two weeks ago.
What came next was hours of calls. Mona rang his family, his friends, his office, one by one, saying the same words each time, the dread growing with every call.
She wanted someone to answer for it. “Why couldn’t you save him?” she asked the police. “Why were you late?”
“We tried to save everyone. We even rescued a six-month-old baby. I don’t know why he didn’t shout or respond. We were banging on every door, but somehow he was missed,” an officer at the scene said, responding to questions about the delay. “We were a small team. At the same time, we had to control the crowd outside while pulling people out from inside. There was panic everywhere. We are human too. We didn’t have proper equipment, and even masks were limited. Still, we did what we could.”
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Mona had known Rishabh for four years. Her elder sister had known him for about a year, through her.
“He was a baby-faced guy with a very humble attitude,” her sister said. “Although we were the same age, he always used to address me as didi. Just three days before, we were flat hunting together. I had no idea what was going to happen a few days later.”
Mona and Rishabh, on the day they first met, December 26, 2022.
Rishabh worked mostly out of Balaghat, she said, and came to the office only when needed. That changed recently, when work from office became mandatory, and he moved to a friend’s place in Noida on a temporary basis. He had been in the city for barely two weeks.
“I haven’t seen a man as considerate, kind, and calm as him,” Mona said. “He was hardworking too. Along with his job, he was preparing for the state PCS and UPSC exams.”
“He was always ready to help anyone around him, whether it was picking someone up after office hours or taking them to the market. It was rare for him to say no. Even after earning well, he was least bothered about spending money on himself. All he cared about was saving or supporting his family and friends,” she added.
The last picture of Rishabh, clicked by Mona on July 10, 2026.
The other person killed in the fire was Sneha Shrivastava, 24, from Muzaffarpur, Bihar.
Two days before the fire, the building’s landlord told Rishabh and the other tenants to vacate. The building was due for renovation. An FIR has been filed at Phase 3 police station against the landlord. He has been arrested.
Fifty families living in rented rooms in the building were evacuated by firefighters before the fire was brought under control. But the building itself made rescue hard by design. It sits on a lane too narrow for a car to enter without reversing all the way back out. Residents said that when fire trucks arrived, they had to clear a path themselves to let them through.
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This isn’t unique to one lane in Noida. Data compiled by the National Disaster Management Authority and the Ministry of Home Affairs shows fire services across large parts of the country are short-staffed, in several states, including Uttar Pradesh, by more than 90 per cent. Even where fire stations exist on paper, many don’t have enough trained staff to respond properly when something goes wrong.
Residents of Mamura, the urban village the building sits in, said loose wires, cramped rooms, and unchecked construction are part of daily life there, the cost of landlords turning old plots into PG rooms for rent, with little thought for how anyone gets out if something goes wrong.
Two days after Rishabh was told to leave, the building he was leaving was gone too. So was he.
