Jamshedpur/Medininagar, A teenage boy drowned in a pond in Jharkhand’s Palamu district on Sunday, while the body of a 13-year-old girl was fished out of the Swarnarekha river in Jamshedpur, police said.
In Jamshedpur, the body of Punam Kumari, 13, was recovered from the Swarnarekha river in the morning, police said. Villagers rescued him from the pond before rushing him to a sub-divisional hospital, where doctors declared him dead. Their mother raised an alarm, prompting locals to launch a rescue operation. They managed to pull out Jyoti, but Punam remained missing. Jyoti was taken to the MGM Hospital in a critical condition, where she is undergoing treatment. Locals alleged that the administration had failed to make adequate security arrangements despite being aware that a large number of devotees would visit the river for the festival. They demanded that an NDRF team be deployed to search for the missing girl. The blockade was lifted a few hours later after police assured the protesters that their demand would be looked into. Dhalbhum Sub-Divisional Officer Arnab Mishra subsequently deployed a team of divers, who recovered Punam’s body about an hour after beginning the search. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
The boy, identified as Rakesh Kumar, had accompanied his mother to a pond in Khatin village in the Chatarpur police station area to immerse items used in the Jitiya Puja rituals when the incident happened, they said. Chatarpur officer-in-charge Saurabh Choubey said the body had been sent to Medinirai Medical College and Hospital for post-mortem examination. Punam and her elder sister, Jyoti Kumari, had gone to the river with their parents on Saturday evening to take a ritual bath on the occasion of Jitiya, when the sisters stepped into deep water and were swept away by the strong current. The agitated locals blocked Mango Bridge late on Saturday night, disrupting traffic. Angered by the absence of a rescue team on Sunday morning, residents again staged a brief protest on the bridge.
