Five children drown in separate incidents during Karma festival in Jharkhand

On Tuesday, five young people who were participating in Karma rites (a harvest festival celebrated by tribal people) drowned in separate events in various locations throughout Jharkhand.

Although residents were able to save three more children from the scene, three girls drowned at a dam in the Chouparan block of the Hazaribagh district, around 150km from Ranchi, the state capital of Jharkhand. Three additional youngsters who were rescued from the same location and are being treated in a hospital while two more kids perished in a dam at Baghmara in Dhanbad.

The children were immersing twigs as part of Karma holiday rites in the water bodies at around 8am on the mornings of the two events, but they were unable to cross the water's current since it had gotten stronger owing to recent rains.
"It was a regrettable incident, and we ask the parents to stop their kids from participating in immersion rites in bodies of water that are raging from recent rains. The body of one girl has been recovered by local rescuers (divers and fisherman). For lack of a better way to phrase it, girls should not. To remove the dead, we have requested aid from the NDRF. "We will attempt to arrange for compensation of Rs. 4 lakh as per disaster management rules to the families of the deceased girls after the formalities and postmortem are finished," said Nancy Sahay, deputy commissioner of Hazaribagh.

According to Poonam Kujur, the Barhi sub-divisional magistrate, the dam near the Bachchhai panchayat in the Chouparan block was built on the Barakkar river, and the high currents make it extremely difficult to remove bodies.

The three drowned girls have been identified as Divya Kumari, Sapna Kumari, and Saraswati Kumari. They were all in Class VIII and from the hamlet of Obra, and were between the ages of 13 and 14. Divya Kumari's body has been located in the water.

Tuesday morning, two kids drowned in the Matigadha dam on the Jamuna River beneath the Baghmara police station. Local divers pulled the bodies from the water, and they were taken to Dumra hospitals where both were pronounced dead. Devraj Kumar, 10, and Saloni Kumari, 14, both Matigadha locals, have been named as the deceased.