Surender Koli was a domestic servant working at house D-5 in Sector 31, Nithari, a village absorbed into Noida on the edge of Delhi, for a businessman named Moninder Singh Pandher.
In December 2006 the skeletal remains of at least nineteen people, most of them children and young women from the poor settlement next to the housing colony, were recovered from a drain running behind the house. The families had been reporting children missing for two years and had been turned away by the Noida police, who did not register the complaints; that refusal, in a case where the missing were the children of migrant labourers and the house belonged to a wealthy man, is the substance of the scandal.
Koli was arrested and confessed, in a statement recorded by a magistrate and later challenged as having been obtained under torture and without access to counsel. He was convicted in a series of separate trials from 2009 and sentenced to death in several. Pandher was convicted in two.
In October 2023 the Allahabad High Court acquitted Koli in twelve of the thirteen cases against him and Pandher in the two against him, in a judgment that was severely critical of the Central Bureau of Investigation: the confession was held inadmissible, the recovery of evidence unproved, and basic investigative steps had not been taken. The court said the investigation had been a betrayal of public trust and that the easy option had been taken of blaming the servant.
Koli remains convicted in one case, that of Rimpa Haldar, in which his death sentence was commuted to life in 2015 over the delay in deciding his mercy petition. He is still in prison. Nineteen people died at Nithari and, after seventeen years, almost none of it has been resolved.