‘Commuters were getting anxious, thirsty, ready to break windows’

“It felt like something had fallen on the roof, and almost immediately the train stopped,” said Gauri Mathur (30), who was on the Chhattarpur-Sultanpur route. “It is worrying that the Metro has only two emergency exits. If there is a real emergency, I am not sure they’ll be able to manage.”

Commuters on two trains that came to a halt on the tracks were stuck inside for well over an hour. Prakriti Singh (28) was travelling from her home in Noida to her workplace, a PR firm in Gurgaon. “There was a screeching sound, the Metro stopped and people almost fell on each other,” she said, adding that eventually, people started feeling uneasy and some started asking around for water.

Authorities took over an hour to open the emergency door to let people out. (Praveen Khanna)

“It was getting warmer and people were getting more and more paranoid,” said Singh, whose 20-minute journey ended up taking more than two hours — from 9.30 am to 11.45 am. “People were getting anxious. Some were planning to break the glass of the Metro because they felt suffocated,” said Gauri.

Before the situation could escalate, the front emergency exit was opened and passengers were deboarded with the help of DMRC officials. “It took more than an hour to evacuate everyone in the Metro,” said Singh. They walked on the tracks, back to Chhattarpur, the closest station, and rushed to buy water from stores nearby.

At Chhattarpur, there was a dearth of cabs and feeder buses. “For every auto that passed, there were hundreds trying to get in,” said Singh. Other trains, meanwhile, slowed down as a result of the snag. “Vishwavidyalaya to MG Road is about an hour on normal days, but today it took two hours,” said Nehal Grover (20), a student of Kirori Mal College.

“Even though I wanted to stop at an earlier station, I could not get out because people rushed in as soon as the doors opened,” added the Delhi University student.