Nine youngsters meet watery graves in Telangana, Andhra

Hyderabad/Visakhapatnam : Nine youngsters drowned in two separate incidents in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, officials said on Sunday.

Bodies of six youngsters who drowned in the Medigadda barrage across the Godavari River in Telangana’s Jayashankar Bhupalapally district on Saturday were recovered on Sunday.

Three students of Class 10 drowned in a lake in the Alluri Sitharamaraju district of Andhra Pradesh on Sunday. The incident occurred at the Guntaseema panchayat headquarters in Dumbriguda mandal.

The boys had gone to the lake for swimming. They were identified as K. Sushant, G. Bhanu Tejam and Sai Kiran.

According to police, the three friends had gone to the lake for swimming during the holidays.

Meanwhile, the bodies of six youths were retrieved from the Medigadda barrage in Telangana.

The bodies of Madhusudhan, 18, P. Shiva Manoj, 15, Rakshit, 13, Karnala Sagar, 16, Ram Charan, 18, and P. Rahul, 19, were pulled out by rescue workers from the barrage.

The bodies were shifted to the government hospital, Mahadevpur, for autopsy.

Eight members of an extended family from Ambatipalli and Korlakunta villages had gone to Medigadda for a bath on Saturday. The boys were accompanied by a middle-aged man, Patti Venkataswami.

The group had gone to the barrage after attending the wedding reception of their relative.

Venkataswami and another person managed to survive the accident. Two of the deceased, Madhusudhan and Manoj, are the sons of Venkataswami.

IT and Industries Minister D. Sridhar Babu had instructed district authorities to launch large-scale search and rescue operations immediately. He also directed senior officials from the Revenue and Police Departments to rush to the spot and monitor the situation closely.

Teams from the police, fire services, Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL), State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) participated in the rescue operation. Expert swimmers and three boats were deployed to retrieve the bodies from the river.

According to police, initially, two boys started to drown. Others attempted to rescue them, and in the process, all of them lost their lives.

Officials said water inflows in the Godavari at Medigadda increased due to recent rains in the upstream areas.

IANS