Woman Taking Selfie Dies After Accidentally Being Pushed By Man Taking Selfie

• A New Year picnic among friends ended with tragedy after an Odisha woman died while taking a selfie.
• The woman, identified as Nirupama Prajapati, got tangled with an accident that caused her to fall into the river near a popular picnic spot in India.
• A video footage revealed that an unidentified man slipped while taking a selfie and knocked Prajapati off the ravine rocks.
• Prajapati’s family and several firefighters searched for 22 hours before they found her body in a stone cavity a few meters away from where the accident occurred.

A woman, identified as Nirupama Prajapati, was found dead 22 hours after falling into a river while taking a selfie near Kanakund, a well-known waterfall and picnicking spot in Sundargarh district of Odisha in India.

Prajapati, who hailed from Rajgangpur, Kumbharpada, had come to the spot for a New Year picnic with her friends when the accident occurred. 

Authorities said that Prajapati’s body was found nestled in a stone cavity on the deep end of the river, a quarter of a mile away from the place where she had accidentally fallen off. 

The incident, which was captured on a video taken by one of Prujapati’s friends, revealed that she was taking selfies on the ravine rocks. She had been posing for a photo next to a fast-moving stream when an unidentified man taking a selfie near the edge of the water slipped and knocked her over. She slipped and fell into the water before she got carried away by the heavy current. The video ended as Prajapati drifted away. Before it ended, it also captured the screams of the onlookers in the background.

According to the reports, Prajapati’s family and men from the fire department spent 22 hours searching the waters before the body was found.

Death by selfie

Prajapati’s case is not the first death caused by a selfie. Nor is it the first in India, a country that listed the highest number of deaths by selfie, according to a study published in 2018.

An equally tragic incident also ended the life of a 13-year-old student in Odisha after he tried taking a selfie from atop a COVID-special train. The student burned to death after getting entangled with a high-voltage electrical wire.

Another selfie incident in 2017 caused the death of nine out of 11 passengers of a boat in Nagpur. Reports revealed that the group had gathered towards one side of the boat while doing a Facebook Live in the Vena dam. The imbalance caused the boat to capsize, resulting in the accident. Only three persons — two boatmen and one college student — survived the accident.

Watch the full video here.