Odisha: Four students drown in Kuakhai river

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Four students of a private management institute in Odisha drowned in Kuakhai river on the outskirts of the capital city, police said on Wednesday, according to PTI report.

The incident took place on Tuesday when a group of eight students went for a bath in the river near Dhabalahar village under Balianta block on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.

While two bodies were retrieved on Tuesday, bodies of two other missing youths were found on Wednesday.

The deceased have been identified as Aryan Mishra of Jamshedpur, Kumar Avinash of Cuttack, Rohit Parida of Balasore and Prateek Dhalasamanta of Balikuda.

Police said the eight friends from a private management college in the city went to the river for a bath when four among them slipped into deep waters and got swept away by the strong currents.

Fire services personnel along with some scuba divers carried out a search operation on Tuesday. However, the operation was stopped at night and resumed on Wednesday morning.

"The youths had come take bath in the river around 2pm. Police received information about 5pm. Police and firefighters managed to retrieve the bodies of the missing students with the help of locals," Balianta police station IIC Jubaraj Swain said.

In a separate incident, earlier in April this year, three college students drowned in Nalia river in Odisha's Bhadrak district, while two others were rescued, police said. The five youths from two nearby villages had gone to the river to bathe near Haripur village and were swept away by the current, the police said. Villagers who were on the river bank saw two of them striving to stay afloat and jumped in to save their lives. They pulled out all five of them and rushed them to the Bhadrak district hospital, where doctors declared three of them dead.

Malay Jena, a local resident, said the five students had slipped into a deep end in the river and three of them drowned.

Of the two students who survived, one is in a critical and another was released later in the day, a hospital official said.

(With PTI inputs)