Four students die in a Vrindavan gurukul tank after a foul smell

Four students at a Sanskrit gurukul in Vrindavan died in the early hours of Wednesday after they went into an unused underground water tank to find the source of a foul smell. A fifth student survived. Mathura police have taken two owners of the school into custody and are waiting on family complaints before they register a case.

The school is Maharishi Panini Sanskrit Gurkulam, also reported as Panini Sanskrit Gurukulam, in Chaitanya Vihar 2. Mathura Senior Superintendent of Police Shlok Kumar told The Indian Express that students were cooking on the ground floor of the ashram after 11.30 pm on Tuesday when the smell came out of the tank nearby. They tried to clear it by lifting out a small amount of water with a bucket. One student then climbed down stairs built into the tank and did not answer when the others called. Four more went down, one after another, to bring him out. All five fell unconscious. Staff and local residents pulled them out. Police tried CPR and first aid, then sent them to hospital. Four died during treatment. The fifth is stable.

Names and ages do not yet match across the two main reports, and the difference should stay visible until the families and the post-mortem settle it. The Indian Express, citing police, named Manu Katare, 21, of Jabalpur; Vishu, 18, and Aryan, 18, of Meerut and Kaushambi; and Devansh, 17, of Vidisha. The Times of India named Manu Katare, 22; Vishu Sharma, 19; Aryan Pandey, 16; and Devansh Sharma, 17, and named the survivor as Rudraksh. The Express did not name the survivor. Both accounts agree on four dead, one living, and a tank entered at night because of a smell.

They also disagree on depth. Kumar's account, as carried by the Express, put the tank at about 15 feet. District Magistrate Chandra Prakash Singh told reporters it was a nearly 12-foot water submersible tank. Singh said five children entered to clean it, four died from poisonous gas, and one was safe. He said a detailed inquiry would ask how the accident happened and who was running the gurukul. He added that the chief minister had taken cognisance and that assistance would go to the families.

The gas itself has not been named. Police have called it suspected poisonous gas, which in a closed, unused tank usually means a mix low in oxygen and high in gases released by stagnant water and decaying matter. Hydrogen sulphide is the common suspect in such tanks in India, because it smells foul at low concentration and knocks a person out at higher concentration before he can climb back up the ladder. That pattern fits what Kumar described: the first student did not return, and each rescuer who followed also went quiet. It is the same sequence that kills municipal workers in sewers every year. A bucket of water removed from the top does not vent a tank of that depth.

The school runs classes from class 6 to class 12, the Times of India reported. The operator reportedly left the premises after the incident. Police said further legal action would follow a complaint from the families. That is a procedural point with a practical cost. Until a first information report is filed, the custody of the two owners sits on the preliminary inquiry rather than on a registered offence. Kumar said the force was waiting for those complaints.

Vrindavan has hundreds of small ashram schools that draw boys from other districts for Sanskrit and priestly training. Many are residential, lightly staffed at night, and built around older water works that no longer feed the kitchen. An unused tank with a stair inside it is an invitation if nobody has locked the cover. The students were not municipal contractors. They were cooking, noticed a smell, and treated the tank as something they could fix. The fifth student, alive in hospital, is the only direct witness to the order in which they went down.

What the district still has to produce is a gas reading, a post-mortem cause for each boy, a single list of ages, and the name of the person who left the tank open. Singh has promised the inquiry. The chief minister's office has noted the deaths. Neither of those steps answers the mechanical question the tank already poses: why a residential school for minors had an unsealed, unused chamber deep enough that five students could disappear into it between a late meal and midnight.