Three college students drowned in Nalia river in Odisha's Bhadrak district on Tuesday, while two others were rescued, police said. The five youths from two nearby villages had gone to the river to bathe near Haripur village and were swept away by the current, the police said.
Villagers who were on the river bank saw two of them striving to stay afloat and jumped in to save their lives. They pulled out all five of them and rushed them to the Bhadrak district hospital, where doctors declared three of them dead.
Malay Jena, a local resident, said the five students had slipped into a deep end in the river and three of them drowned. Of the two students who survived, one is in a critical and another was released later in the day, an hospital official said.
