A four-year-old girl was killed after a major fire broke out in a government-run residential school in Chhattisgarh's tribal-dominated Bijapur district in the wee hours of Thursday, officials said.
The deceased was not a student of the school. She was staying with her relative, who is a student of Class 8 in the school, for the last few days, they said.
The blaze erupted, apparently due to a short-circuit, at around 1 a.m. at the porta cabin (prefabricated portable structure) school for girls in Chintakonta village under Awapalli police station limits, Bijapur Collector Anurag Pandey said.
Visuals of the spot showed the porta cabin structure was completely gutted in the fire. Porta cabins are used for setting up school infrastructure in some of the Naxal-affected areas of the state.
"At around 1 am, a female staffer of the facility saw flames in the facility and informed her colleagues following which they evacuated the children from their rooms," said Pandey who along with other officials visited the spot to take stock of the incident.
The residential school has three blocks which were set up using bamboo. The fire rapidly spread in all the blocks and the structures were gutted, he said.
As many as 308 children from classes 1 to 8 and some from classes 10 and 12 are there in the residential school. They all were evacuated by the staff members, Pandey said.
However, a class 6 student informed that her 4-year-old niece (brother's daughter) who was staying with her from the last few days, was inside the room, but by then it was too late and the child could not be saved, he said.
The victim stayed with the student after she came to visit the latter along with her family a few days back.
On Monday, the girl's parents had come to take her back but she refused to go. The child was allowed to stay there on humanitarian ground, the official said.
The deceased's family members said they had planned to go there on Thursday to take her back home, he said.
"Prima facie, it seems an electric short-circuit in the starter switch of a borewell pump could have triggered the fire, but the exact cause would be known after the forensic investigation," he said, adding that further investigation is underway.
After being alerted, a fire brigade team reached the spot and the blaze was brought under control with the help of villagers, officials said.
