A female civil services aspirant from Mancherial of Telangana was among three persons who drowned in a flooded basement of a building which housed an IAS coaching centre in New Delhi on Saturday evening.
Tania Soni (25), the daughter of Vijay Kumar, a manager at SRP-I underground mine in Srirampur was among the three aspirants who met a watery grave when the basement was flooded by rainwater. Vijay Kumar hails from Bihar.
Soni joined the coaching centre with an aim to become an IAS officer a year ago. Her parents, who were in Nagpur to admit their daughter in a college, rushed to New Delhi to bring the body of Soni back to Mancherial. Her body was retrieved during a rescue operation taken up jointly by personnel of NDRF, local police and fire department.
Her family members remembered her as a highly motivated person with big dreams, and said she had been attending coaching classes in the national capital since last year.Her father, Vijay Kumar, his wife, and another daughter were going to Lucknow in a train when they received the news of Tanya’s death.
Her father works with the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) and resides at Mancherial.He is a deputy general manager at the SCCL’s Srirampur area.
The three aspirants were trapped in the basement of Rau’s IAS Study Circle at Bada Bazar Marg around 7 pm on Saturday. The building of the coaching centre got flooded following heavy rains in the capital of the country. The basement filled up to 12 feet of water in no time, making it impossible to escape for the aspirants, according to reports.
Union Minister BJP Telangana State President G. Kishan Reddy expressed shock over Tania Soni’s death and he contacted her father Vijay Kumar on phone. He expressed his deepest condolences to the family members.
Kishan Reddy instructed his office staff in Delhi to talk to the Delhi Police and other officials and take the initiative to complete all the pending formalities as soon as possible.
The incident which occurred after a nearby drain in the area burst took the lives of Shreya Yadav (from UP), Nivin Dalwin (from Kerala) and Tanya Soni (from Telangana), the police confirmed. According to eyewitnesses, the basement filled with 10-12 feet of water in almost no time, giving students no chance to escape.
A faculty member also said when the flooding first began, a call was made to 112, but traffic jams led to delays in rescuers reaching there. The Delhi Police have arrested the coordinator of Rau’s IAS centre in Old Rajinder Nagar and the building owner after flooding in its basement killed three students, including two women.