Eyewitness account: A hit-and-run case in Noida

Noida: It would have been one more hit-and-run case, a poor cyclist's life snuffed out by a speeding car, one more entry in the number of accidents on the Noida Expressway. And a routine for me in the past three years. But Thursday was different.

My car broke down, so when I started for Parliament at 2:45 pm, I was in a hurry. For the entire 23-km stretch of the Noida expressway, I maintained a constant speed of 80 km an hour, even though the limit was 100 km.

Just when I reached the Mahamaya flyover at the end of the Expressway, around 10 km from Delhi, I noticed a white Volkswagen in my rear-view mirror, closing in at a menacing speed, zig-zagging its way through.

In just a few seconds, the car flew past me from the left - the wrong side. My natural instinct was to slow down and resort to defensive driving.

There were two cars ahead of me; one just in front and another to its left. In between, there was just about enough space for another car to squeeze in. And that's precisely what the speeding driver attempted, when a cyclist, riding against the traffic on the wrong lane, appeared in front of him.

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It is standard practice on this stretch for cyclists, in the morning and evenings, to take the wrong side. Usually, the cyclists cross over in groups, 20-30 at a time. But this wasn't the case yesterday - a lone cyclist found himself in a front of a speeding car, being driven rashly.

Within seconds, I saw the cyclist thrown up at least 10 feet above, and come down crashing as his head hit the ground.

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Instinctively, I hit the brakes and my car screeched to a stop. As I froze for a few seconds, I saw the white car stopping a few feet away from the fallen cyclist.

Just as I was getting out, the driver sped off. A motorcyclist just ahead of me gave chase and so did I. Luckily, he was forced to stop due to a flat tyre and we caught him about a km away. The driver was a young boy, not more than 20. He told us he was a student of a private university in Noida and started dropping names, flaunting his connections.

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As I stopped a gathering crowd from hitting him, I asked, "Why did you leave the injured man and run away?" "Main aur karta yaar, (what else could I do, man?)," came the instant reply from the boy, almost 20 years younger to me.

We called the police and hand over the boy to them.

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The wounded cyclist had been taken to the Kailash hospital, around five km from the accident spot. He died five hours later. An ID card on him revealed that he was Vinod, 32, a resident of Madanpur Khadar, a low-income residential colony near Apollo Hospital in south Delhi.

The cops have arrested the young driver, who is the son of an eminent lawyer. And the case will now be fought in courts, where at least one party is well-versed with the rules of the game.

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(Sandeep Phukan is the Deputy National Editor at NDTV 24X7)