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3 Odisha girls who died by suicide were upset over refusal of permission to visit night fair
For the first few days, people in the village kept quiet over the possible reason for the suicide of the girls. However, following sustained police interrogation, it was revealed that the girls decided to end their lives after their family members did not allow them to go to Umerkote to watch the Kalasi Yatra and a fair late in the evening.
A week after three girls, including two minors of Nabarangpur district, were found hanging from a tree in a case of a suicide pact, police on Friday said curbs on their movement by their family members had led to their decision to die together.
Two tribal girls and another young OBC woman from a village under Umerkote block of Nabarangpur district, on Saturday evening had gone to a forest together at around 4 pm. When they did not come back home even after 9:30 pm, their families frantically searched for them and found the bodies hanging from the branch of a Kusum tree. The post-mortem reports confirmed deaths due to suicide.
For the first few days, people in the village kept quiet over the possible reason for the suicide of the girls. However, following sustained police interrogation, it was revealed that the girls decided to end their lives after their family members did not allow them to go to Umerkote to watch the Kalasi Yatra and a fair late in the evening.
“When their family members did not allow them to go to Umerkote, 22 km away, to see the festival and for shopping they became frustrated. A discussion was held at the house of one of the girls between 3 and 4 pm following which they went to the tree to end their lives,” said Nabarangpur SP Smith Parmar. Incidentally, the girls, all school dropouts, did not leave any suicide note behind.
Police officials, who investigated the case, said the eldest of the girls had been separated from her husband four years ago and stayed at her parent’s place. She wanted to go to Chennai for tailoring training, but her parents had put their foot down.
“The other two girls who had dropped out of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic too wanted to go out, but their parents were wary of them meeting boys. In these parts of Odisha, parents of girls are wary of their daughters getting pregnant before marriage. The parents of the two tribal girls also did not like their daughters being friends with the girl who had been separated from her husband,” said the official.
Though the National Crime Records Bureau statistics indicated that more people died of suicide in 2020 compared to deaths due to Covid-19, a peer-reviewed study by a team of doctors from Veer Surendra Sai Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Sambalpur for the month of April-September 2020 said 38% of all the deaths during the period in 6 western Odisha districts were due to suicide. Of the 891 deaths reported to the hospital mortuary from 6 western Odisha districts, 340 were suicides. Around 40 per cent of the people who died by suicide were in their 30s while 19 per cent were in their 40s.
