Ghaziabad: A three-year-old girl allegedly drowned in rainwater that collected outside her home in Vijay Nagar’s Sarvodaya Nagar area amid heavy rainfall on Thursday morning. The girl, Manvi alias Pallavi, was found lying in a lane near her house after the water receded and was declared dead on arrival at a nearby private hospital.The girl’s father, Sumit Kumar, a native of Sirauli village in Farrukhabad district, said that following heavy rain more than two feet of water accumulated in lane number 3 of Sarvodaya Colony where the family lives around 12.30 pm, flooding over two dozen homes. DCP City Dhawal Jaiswal said family members claimed the girl had followed her father as he left for work. As she was playing near the gate of her house, she possibly slipped and fell into the flooded lane. No formal complaint has been filed.An angry crowd carried the body to NH-9, prompting a 25-minute traffic jam before police from Vijay Nagar, Crossing Republik and Wave City cleared the highway. Residents said Sarvodaya Colony, which lies below the Delhi-Meerut Expressway, floods annually because of a clogged drain along the highway, and that repeated complaints to municipal officials have gone unaddressed. Two feet of water stood in the lane on Thursday, flooding more than two dozen homes.
