Cuttack, Aug. 30: Three students of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Bhubaneswar, who had come to the Mahanadi to take a bath at Gadagadia ghat here, drowned this afternoon.

The deceased have been identified as Srishti Pal, 22, from Calcutta, Sandip Kumar, 22, from Ranchi and Pritam Priyadarshi, 23, from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh. Supratik Bhattacharya, 24, from Chhattisgarh, who had also accompanied them to the bathing ghat but did not go into the river, was the only one to survive.

Pal and Kumar are third-year students, while Priyadarshi and Bhattacharya were studying in the fourth year.

"The incident occurred at Gadagadia Ghat around 2pm. The four students had come from Bhubaneswar on two motorcycles," said inspector in charge of Cantonment police station Biswajit Mohanty.

Eyewitnesses said one student first slipped into deep-water possibly due to shifting sand bed. Two others, who tried to save him, were dragged away by the strong current of the river.

People gathered at the spot when they saw Bhattacharya crying aloud near the ghat. The police, fire service personnel and Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force (Odraf) personnel were soon pressed into action to rescue the students.

Though the district administration had installed poles as a temporary barricade to prevent people from venturing into the deepwater of Mahanadi, it is suspected that the students had overlooked the warning signals.

"We reached the spot around 2.25pm and two teams with divers recovered two bodies. Another body was recovered later by an Odraf unit," said fire officer Laxmidhar Pradhan. The bodies were recovered some 500 metres away from the spot where they.

It is the third incident of drowning in Cuttack in the recent past. A student of Sri Sri University had drowned in Kathajodi river on August 25.

On August 28, two inmates of a child care institution had drowned in the Kendrapara canal within the limits of Jagatpur police station.

"We have installed several warning signboards. But, it seems that the students had ventured a long way into the river, much beyond the barricades installed there," said district collector Nirmal Chandra Mishra, adding that in many areas, the river is about 20ft to 25ft deep and people should always be extra careful.

The district administration had installed the caution boards at several places on the riverbank, including near Jobra anicut where four students of Ravenshaw University had drowned on April 4, 2015.