Sonepat trainee IAS officer drowns in pool
NEW DELHI: A 30-year-old trainee IAS officer drowned trying to save a woman colleague in a swimming pool of the Foreign Service Institute in south Delhi’s Ber Sarai around midnight on Monday, police said.
Ashish Dahiya from Sonepat in Haryana was among more than two dozen young officers who congregated for a poolside party before leaving for their assigned place of duty.
Most of the officers left before midnight, leaving Dahiya and about eight more behind. It was around that time that a woman Indian Revenue Service officer slipped into the 10-foot-deep pool.
“Some of officers jumped in and rescued the woman,” said Chinmoy Biswal, additional DCP (South). In the commotion they failed to notice Dahiya has disappeared. But the woman remembered that he too was among those who helped pull her out.
She alerted her friends and a search began. They spotted Dahiya floating in the water with his face down. Attempts were made to revive him. “One of the officers is a doctor and he applied cardiopulmonary resuscitation before rushing him to Fortis Hospital,” Biswal said.
Dahiya was brought to the hospital in Vasant Kunj at 12.50am, where doctors declared him dead on arrival. Police later sent the body to AIIMS for an autopsy.
The 2016-batch IAS officer from the Jammu and Kashmir cadre was to report as an assistant collector in Srinagar from Thursday.
He and his friends completed their training at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie a week ago.
His family members, who reached Delhi on Tuesday morning, said Dahiya was a good swimmer and questioned how he could drown in a placid swimming pool. They demanded a CBI probe.
“During his training as a Himachal Pradesh police officer, he once swum across the Bhakra Nangal dam on the Sutlej,” said his uncle, Kuldeep Singh.
Another family member said: “We were informed that he died as water entered his lungs.”
Ishwar Singh, the DCP (South), dismissed foul play and said the autopsy report confirms he drowned. “There were no external injuries on the body. The autopsy was videographed.”