Four girls studying in a residential ashram school run by religious leader Sadhvi Ritambhara drowned in a canal in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district on Wednesday. police gave this information. An official said that the incident took place in the morning in Kothi village of Mandhata (Omkareshwar) police station area. He said the girls were in the age group of 10 to 11 years and all of them were girl students of class V and lived in the ashram run by Sadhvi Ritambhara.
Mandhata police station in-charge Balram Singh said that the girls had gone to the canal to take a bath, when one of them started drowning and other girls tried to save her. However, they all drowned, he said. The deceased have been identified as Vaishali, Pratigya, Divyanshi and Anjana, all residents of Khargone district, a police official said.
He said that the police have taken out the bodies from the canal and sent them for post-mortem. Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in a statement condoled the death of the girl students. The family members say that there is no proper arrangement of bathroom in the ashram for the girls to take bath. The bathrooms of the ashram are broken. For this reason, a total of 11 girls went to the banks of the canal to take a bath.
Dharam Singh, a family member, said that 11 girls had gone to the canal to bathe due to poor bathroom facilities in the ashram. 6 girls had landed in the canal earlier. Out of these, 2 girls were rescued while 4 other girls drowned.