Thirty hours have passed and rescue teams are still searching for a missing villager after a boat carrying nine people capsized in the Batra Dam in Surajpur district of Chhattisgarh. The incident occurred in the early hours of Monday, around 2 am, when the group had ventured out onto the reservoir under cover of darkness to fish illegally.

Two bodies have since been recovered. One man remains unaccounted for.

All nine belonged to villages in the surrounding area — Raiñ, Bhaiyathan, and Uchadih — and the incident falls under the jurisdiction of the Karanji police outpost. Six of those on board managed to swim to safety after the boat lost balance and overturned. Three could not make it out of the water. By the following morning, during rescue operations, the bodies of Samaylal, 45, and Jagalal, 45, both residents of village Raiñ, were pulled from the dam. The search for Kanwal Sai of Bhaiyathan continues.

The six who survived — identified as Lalji, Vijay Prasad, Ved Kumar, Kameshwar, Holder, and Rajkumar — raised the alarm, and relatives of the missing reached the site through the night. Karanji police and a team from the District Disaster Response Force (DDRF) were mobilised and have been conducting search operations since.

The boat the group was travelling on has also not been located.

What compounds the tragedy is the context in which it happened. Fishing in the Batra Dam had been formally prohibited after the lease period for a fish farming contract expired. Despite the ban, the villagers had gone out in the dead of night, nets in hand, taking the risk to fish without authorisation. That decision cost two men their lives, and the fate of a third remains unknown.

Families of the missing and the deceased have gathered at the site. DDRF personnel are continuing their search as the hours stretch on.

Chhattisgarh has seen a cluster of such dam-related tragedies in recent days. In a separate incident in Jashpur district on Sunday, a pregnant woman — eight months along — and her young daughter drowned in the Ghoghra Dam while bathing. The two were swept into deeper water; an elder daughter managed to swim to safety. That incident falls under Patthalgaon police station limits. Bodies in that case were recovered after a difficult search operation.