An elderly woman,65-year-old Saraswati Devi and her two sons, 44-year-old Dharmendra Bisht and 38-year-old Khushal Singh Bisht, died of suffocation inside an under-construction underground water tank in Haldwani, Uttarakhand.
Dharmendra had entered the tank on his field to remove the shuttering and lost consciousness, prompting his brother Khushal and then their mother Saraswati to climb down one after another to check on them, where all three collapsed.
Local villagers rescued them by breaking open part of the tank and rushed them to Sushila Tiwari Hospital, where doctors declared them dead. Officials suspect a toxic gas leak—possibly methane or hydrogen sulfide, from a nearby biogas plant as the potential cause.
