Lanka Police, NDRF Search Ganga After Teen Drowns at Ravidas Ghat

Lanka police and NDRF teams are searching the Ganga after Shivam Biswas, 16, of Nagwa, was swept into deep water while bathing at Ravidas Ghat late Saturday evening, with Station Officer Rajkumar Sharma saying the night search was paused for darkness and strong current and would resume Sunday.

Shivam knew how to swim, according to the account police are working from, but a strong current pulled him out from the bathing stretch. Ravidas Ghat sits under Lanka police station’s riverside beat. Officers and NDRF personnel began a search after the alarm was raised; as light failed and the flow stayed hard, the night effort was stood down with a plan to restart on Sunday.

His father, Ujjwal Biswas, reached the ghat after word spread. The family lives in Nagwa — father, mother and two sons. Shivam worked with wedding and catering cooks, a common livelihood for young men from the lane belts behind the southern ghats. The desk is keeping identifying detail to the name, age and place already on the police missing-and-search record and is not expanding private family particulars.

Ghat drownings after evening baths are a recurring monsoon-season risk when the river runs high or the undercurrent shifts after rain. Saturday’s wet spell and the Ganga’s recent rise-and-fall notes from the Central Water Commission sit in the same weather week, but the immediate cause on the police wrap is the current at the bathing point, not a formal flood warning. Swimmers who know the stretch can still be caught when the channel pulls harder than it looked from the steps.

SO Rajkumar Sharma’s public line is that the search is continuing. NDRF boats and shore parties typically work a grid along the flow and the downstream bends when a person is swept from a city ghat; the desk is not inventing a kilometre mark or a recovery time that officers have not put on record. Until a recovery or a confirmed sighting, the file remains an active search.

Residents along the Ravidas–Assi belt who saw the evening bath or the first alarm have been the natural first witnesses. Anyone with phone video of the stretch from late Saturday should preserve it for Lanka police. Family and neighbours waiting at the ghat through the night is the ordinary human scene after such a call; it is not a finding about what happened under the water.

Readers planning morning baths on Sunday should treat the same current warning seriously. The search teams need clear steps and clear water access more than a crowd on the landing. The desk will update if SO Sharma’s station or the NDRF unit reports a recovery or a change in the search pattern. Until then, Shivam Biswas, 16, of Nagwa, remains the subject of an active Ganga search out of Ravidas Ghat under Lanka police.