Six teenage students of an English-medium school drowned in a dam in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh district on Tuesday morning.

Hazaribagh deputy commissioner Nancy Sahay said that the boy students, all of 17 years, had bunked their classes and gone to the dam when the unfortunate incident took place.

“The students had bunked their classes and gone to the dam, around 14km from the district headquarters. As per locals, two students had gone a bit deep and apparently, they did not know how to swim and started drowning. To rescue them four other students rushed to the water and they also drowned. One student who did not enter the dam informed the locals and subsequently the administration,” said Nancy Sahay.

The deputy commissioner said that local divers and the NDRF were deployed to retrieve the bodies and after conducting the post-mortem, the bodies were handed over to the relatives.

“We have started the process of giving compensation as per state disaster act rules and each of the families of the deceased students will get a compensation amount of Rs 4 lakh,” added Sahay.

Locals said that the Class XII students of CBSE-affiliated Mount Egmont School in Canary Hills Road of Hazaribagh had gone to Lotua Reservoir in Ichak block around 11am.

They started taking baths in the dam. Two boys out of excitement went to the shallow portion and shouted for help while drowning and four others rushed for their help and also drowned in the process.

Only one student Sanu Kumar, who escaped this accident, informed the villagers about the incident and the villagers informed the police.

Later, other students of the school, along with the police and administration officials, reached the spot. Mobile phones were lying in the bags of all the boys. Gradually the family members also reached there. The deceased have been identified as Rajnesh Pandey, Sumit Kumar, Mayank Singh, Shiv Sagar, Ishan Kumar Singh and Praveen Singh.