A 23-year-old Dalit house surgeon at a government medical college in Telangana’s Siddipet district allegedly died by suicide after being cheated by a senior resident doctor who promised to marry her but later refused due to caste differences, police said on Monday.

The woman allegedly self-injected a herbicide in her hostel room on January 3 after learning that the accused would not marry her. She fell unconscious and was rushed first to a hospital in Siddipet and later to a state-run facility in Hyderabad, where she died in the early hours of January 4 while undergoing treatment.

Based on a complaint lodged by the victim’s sister, police registered a case under relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and arrested the accused.

The deceased hailed from a poor family in Jogulamba-Gadwal district. She studied in a social welfare school before joining MBBS at the Government Medical College in Siddipet in 2020, police said.

She is known to have excelled in academics and sports, and games, police said. Her parents work as labourers, while her elder sister is a software engineer.

The deceased was doing her internship at the Government Medical College in Siddipet, where she got acquainted with the accused, a senior resident, in July last year, police said.

The accused, who belongs to a backward class, promised to marry her but later refused, citing caste difference, which led her to take the extreme step, police said.