Bank employees die after SUV gets stuck in submerged Faridabad underpass

A bank manager and a cashier were killed after their SUV was submerged in water in a flooded underpass in Faridabad on Friday.

Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR) have been witnessing heavy rain and the underpass was flooded because of that. Police said Punyashreya Sharma, who was the manager of HDFC Bank’s branch in Gurugram’s Sector 31 and Viraj Dwivedi, who was a cashier there, were returning home to Faridabad in a Mahindra XUV700 on Friday evening. They reached the Old Faridabad railway underpass and saw that it was flooded but failed to gauge how high the water was.

After the SUV started getting submerged, the two men tried to get out of the vehicle and swim to safety, but drowned. Police officials said a team reached the underpass on getting information about an SUV being stuck there and while Sharma’s body was pulled out of the vehicle, Dwivedi’s body was found only at 4 am on Saturday after an hours-long search.

Heavy rain had continued In Delhi and the National Capital Region for the second straight day on Friday. An orange alert (for heavy to very heavy rainfall) had been issued by the India Meteorological Department for both Thursday and Friday in Delhi and the weather office said a depression over southwest Uttar Pradesh was causing the rain.

Traffic jams and waterlogging were reported in several parts of NCR on Friday. In Gurugram, the affected areas included Hero Honda chowk, Rajiv chowk and IFFCO chowk.

Spells of rain continued on Saturday and a yellow alert (for moderate rainfall) is in place. According to IMD data, Delhi has seen over 1,000 mm of rainfall this month, which is the highest since 2021 and the second highest in at least a decade.