A strange silence prevailed near D-5 in Noida’s Sector 31 in the run-up to Friday’s pronouncement of sentence by the special CBI court, broken only by stray comments by police and media personnel. The streets were also near-empty in adjoining Nithari village.

Suddenly, a boy bolted across, yelling “mil gayi, mil gayi” (got it, got it). News of the capital punishment to Moninder Singh Pandher and Surinder Koli had flashed on television screens by then.

And, almost as suddenly, the streets got busy. A neighbour of Pandher’s, who refused to give her name, said, “It has been bad for us since December 2006 (when skeletons were dug out from a drain outside Pandher’s house). People refuse to come to our house.”

She claimed that rents in the sector have gone down rapidly, and in fact many owners have left their houses. “People do not take up accommodation on rent in this sector because of the name Nithari attached to it,” she said.

Fellow Sector-31 resident Neeta Jain said, “Many people left after that incident, and getting tenants have been difficult since.”

Just metres across the street is property dealer Praveen Kasana’s shop/office — in Nithari village. But neither the rents nor takers have gone down for accommodation in and around the village, he claimed. The upscale Sector 31, though, is a different story. Near ground zero, “people refuse to even look at the house (D-5),” Kasana said.

The rentals have suffered as a result. “Rent for a first-floor or ground-floor house used to be Rs 10,000 till a couple of years ago,” Kasana said. “But since then the response has been bad though many have drastically slashed rents.”

... contd.