Telangana hostel warden held after 6 students drown during immersion

Police said Rao had accompanied the students to the lake for the immersion but did not enter the water.

Hyderabad: A day after six students of Sirisha Memorial Charitable Trust drowned during Ganesh idol immersion in a lake near Patancheru, police on Thursday arrested the hostel warden on charges of negligence.

The warden, identified as Varanasi Jay Prakash Rao, 53, was taken into custody around 8 am and later produced before a magistrate, who sent him to judicial remand. A case was registered against him under Section 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).

Police said Rao had accompanied the students to the lake for the immersion but did not enter the water to supervise them or take any precautionary measures, despite being aware of the risk.

According to Patancheru police, eight boys entered the lake with the idol on Wednesday evening. When one of them began to drown, he grabbed the hand of another boy nearby, and the group lost balance, pulling all of them into the water along with the idol. Two managed to swim to safety, while the remaining six drowned.

Alerted by other students waiting on the shore, hostel staff and locals rushed to the spot and pulled the bodies out of the water. An ambulance and police reportedly reached the site nearly an hour later.

The deceased were identified as G Narasimha Raju, 22, A Uday Kiran, 18, R Ganesh, 19, B Sumanth Reddy, S Shyam Kumar, 17, and N Siddharth, 16. Postmortem examinations were conducted at a local hospital under tight security.

Police initially believed the boys were orphans, but later found that some had single parents or came from financially weaker families across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Family members rushed to Patancheru on Wednesday night and demanded strict action against the warden over his alleged negligence.