A Mahindra Scorpio SUV driven by national-level basketball player Yatish Yadav, 24, collided head-on with a dumper truck on National Highway 309 near Pirumadara, in Ramnagar, Uttarakhand, India, in the early hours of Friday, Oct. 2, 2026, police said. Yadav died at the spot.
Police placed the time of the collision between 1:20 a.m. and 1:45 a.m. His wife, Sheetal Yadav, a doctor, was critically injured.
The dead man’s father told police the couple set off in the Scorpio late on Thursday, Oct. 1, bound for Nainital. Their route took them along the Kashipur-Ramnagar stretch, according to that account. They reached the highway stretch hours after setting out from home.
Residents Alerted Police
Residents near the highway alerted police, telling them a truck had struck a car in the Pirumadara area. Ramnagar Station House Officer (SHO) Sushil Kumar said police sent a team to the site.
Officers took possession of the body and sent it for a postmortem examination, which was conducted at Ramnagar Joint Hospital, where the family arrived. Police took the injured Sheetal Yadav to the same hospital, where she was given initial treatment before being referred to a private hospital in the Delhi-NCR region.
“A detailed investigation into the accident, including the role of the dumper and its driver, is underway,” police said.
What the Father Alleges
Suresh Yadav, the father of the deceased, alleged that the dumper truck’s driver was allegedly attempting to overtake another vehicle and took the load of minor minerals onto the wrong side of the road. By his account, the speeding dumper struck the Scorpio head-on and overturned the SUV, and the force of the impact trapped both husband and wife underneath the vehicle.
The dumper was identified by its registration number as HR38AC 4554, a 22-tire dumper coming from the opposite direction.
Suresh Yadav alleged that negligence by the dumper driver caused the crash. He demanded an impartial investigation and strict action against those found responsible.
Driver Fled, Case Registered
Behind the wheel of the dumper, the driver fled the scene. Acting on the father’s complaint, police registered a case against the unidentified driver and launched a search for him.
As of Oct. 5, there were no reports of an arrest of the fleeing dumper driver, of any charges beyond the case registered against the unidentified driver, or of any change in Sheetal Yadav’s condition since she was referred to Delhi-NCR.
The family’s account supplies the only sequence of events explaining how a loaded dumper came into the Scorpio’s path, and officers have yet to settle who crossed the center line. Investigators are looking at how badly the vehicles were damaged, where the wreckage came to rest and what the truck did in the minutes before impact.
A Shared Two-Lane Route
Shahpur Bametha in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad was home to Yatish Yadav. A private school employed him as a teacher, and he played basketball at the national level. The couple had been married for around four months, police said.
Nainital is one of the hill stations most popular with travelers from the plains, and the couple’s trip there ended on the highway outside Ramnagar. National Highway 309 serves as a main artery into the Kumaon hills. Down it flows tourist traffic from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi alongside heavy commercial vehicles hauling sand, stone and other minor minerals out of the region’s riverbeds. The two traffic streams share the same two lanes through stretches such as Pirumadara, often in the dark.