Mandi, Himachal Pradesh: Rescuers have recovered five bodies today from the River Beas in Himachal Pradesh in a search for 24 students from Telangana who were washed away in a sudden surge of water released from a dam.
The students were all from an engineering college in Hyderabad. They were standing on the Beas river’s edge on Sunday evening taking photographs when they were hit by a torrent of water.
This morning, soldiers, police and other rescue workers were seen combing the banks of the river, while others in kayaks were paddling slowly downstream, checking around boulders. Divers have also been called in, an official said.
A group of nearly 50 engineering students were travelling on buses to the tourist hill station of Manali when they stopped in the Kullu Valley, some 200 kilometres (130 miles) from state capital Shimla.
The surge of water occurred when a hydroelectric power project opened its floodgates, sending tonnes of water downstream, officials have said.
Union Education Minister Smriti Irani reached Mandi this afternoon, where she met the students of the engineering college. Earlier in the morning she had tweeted, “Spoke to Minister of Education Himachal Pradesh Shri Bali re the tragic incident of 24 engineering students feared washed away near Mandi .”
“I tried calling out to my friends…but couldn’t. They also saw the water level rising, I tried helping few of them, but in a span of six seconds, the water level rose to five or six feet…in front of my eyes, they drowned,” said Ravi Kumar, a student who was part of the group.
Angry locals protested, saying authorities had failed to issue a warning about the release of water from the dam. The additional district magistrate has, however, claimed that a siren went off before the dam water was released.
The Congress government in Himachal Pradesh has suspended the project engineer in charge of the Larji Dam.
Telangana Home Minster Nayani Narasimha Reddy and a team of senior police officers and bureaucrats from the state are on their way to supervise relief and rescue measures.
Himachal Pradesh and other Himalayan states including neighbouring Uttarakhand are home to a string of hydroelectric projects as India rushes to expand power generation to meet rising demand.