A Ranchi schoolteacher, who was last seen invigilating the matriculation examination at a government middle school on Thursday, was found floating dead in the Dhurwa reservoir, 15km from the state capital, on Friday.
Nagri police are probing whether 55-year-old Pushpa Kamal, a mother of four and resident of Ratu block, killed herself or was killed, and why.
According to family sources, Pushpa, an art teacher at Prem Manjari Madhya Vidyalaya in Kudlong, Ratu, left home for work around 8.30am.She had been deputed to supervise the Class X mathematics paper at the same school. Thursday's matriculation exam ended at 1pm,but Pushpa did not return home. Her unemployed husband Dharma Singh and their three sons and a daughter searched for her. They, however, did not go to police.
The teacher's body was first spotted by morning-walkers and later fished out by police around 8.30am on Friday. "We were walking along the dam as we normally do around 7.30am. One of us saw a piece of cloth floating on the water surface. When curiosity took us closer, we found it was the body of a woman. Police were informed and they retrieved the corpse an hour or so later," said a local shopkeeper.
Pushpa's shawl and a water bottle, found near the reservoir, have also been seized for further investigations.
Nagri police station in-charge Ajay Kumar Singh said that there were no marks of injury on the body. "It was identified as that of Pushpa Kamal by her husband Dharma Singh who said she was suffering from some illness. We have sent the body for post-mortem at RIMS to ascertain the reason of death."
Ranchi SP Anoop Birtharay said that preliminary investigations had revealed that the teacher had a medical history of epilepsy. "Her husband said she used to remain depressed. However, we will probe all angles (suicide, murder or accident). For now, a UD (unnatural death) case has been registered.
Dhurwa dam has a chequered history. Several incidents of drowning, suspected murder and suicide have been reported at the reservoir in the past couple of years. In 2013, Lav Kumar - the son of deputy secretary (civil aviation) Ram Narayan Ram - had been found dead in the dam.
Again, in 2012, two Class XII students of JVM-Shyamali had drowned here. One of the victims was identified as Amartya Haldar, whose father Amit Kumar Haldar was an assistant general manager with Mecon. The other, Arush Kumar, was the son of Central Coalfields superintendent Sudhir Kumar. The same year, city-based entrepreneur Sumit Mishra had drowned while swimming.
