Bhubaneswar: Three students, who climbed a hillock in Odisha’s Kandhamal district for a better mobile connection, sustained injuries after lightning struck a tree under which they were standing, police said.
Police said the three children from Mundagaon village in Kandhamal’s Chakapada area went up the Digisaru hill near the village to get a better mobile phone signal. Sometime later when it started raining, the children took shelter under a tree which was struck by lightning.
“The three students lost consciousness. When they did not return home by evening, their family went searching for them and found them in critical condition,” said Chakapada police station inspector Tapan Nahak.
The three, said to be out of danger, were identified by the police as Dhiren Digal, a class 11 student, Pinku Mallick, (class 10) and Pancha Behera (class 8). All of them were first admitted to Brahmanapad hospital. One of them was later taken to the district hospital at Phulbani.
A villager said although a mobile tower was recently erected near the village, the data connectivity is still better on the hillock.
In August last year, a 13-year-old tribal student in Rayagada district died when the boulder he was sitting on a hill to attend his online classes rolled down.
In 2015, a tribal preacher and his wife in Pongalpadar village of Kandhamal were shot dead mistakenly by the state’s anti-Maoist police force while they had gone to a hillock to call up their three sons living in Kerala and Hyderabad.
The lack of mobile connectivity caused a major embarrassment for a ruling party MLA when people of a village in Kalahandi district in January this year took him for a ride by getting him to inaugurate a rickety bamboo tower, saying it was a “BSNL 4G tower” . Pradeep Kumar Dishari, the BJD MLA from Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district, did not realize the villagers of Bandhapari gram panchayat were pulling a fast on him to make their point about the patchy mobile network in the village.
The patchy internet connectivity also came up for discussion at chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s meeting with Union home minister Amit Shah last year when the chief minister said there were 6,278 villages in Odisha that did not have internet connectivity.
Union Minister of Communications and Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw recently assured the state to set up 4,000 mobile towers across the state.
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