Baleshwar: After a week of agonising uncertainty and frantic appeals, two Class 10 students from Odisha’s Baleshwar district were safely rescued from Chennai and reunited with their families.
The boys, identified as 15-year-olds Ayush Pati and Akash Singh, are students at the government-run Ratnakar Town High School under Nilagiri police limits. They went missing on October 15 after reportedly scaling the school’s boundary wall during recess, leaving their bags behind in the classroom. When they failed to return home that afternoon, their anxious parents visited the campus and were informed of their disappearance by schoolteachers. Though local resident Lala, who runs a showroom in Nilagiri, reported seeing the duo on the day they went missing, initial police searches yielded no immediate clues despite a formal missing complaint being registered at Nilagiri police station and photographs being circulated across various precincts by Nilagiri IIC Gobardhan Naik.
Living in constant despair for over eight days, the mothers wandered through streets and neighbourhoods holding pictures of their missing sons, clutching onto hope. Relatives and local community members widely shared the boys’ photos across Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, triggering widespread news coverage and viral social media posts.
The breakthrough came when Sukanta Mahalik, a native of Bhadrak working in Chennai, spotted the two teenagers near a railway station in the dead of the night while dropping some relatives. Having recognised their faces from viral news broadcasts and online posts, Mahalik immediately approached the boys to confirm their identities, took them into safe care, and contacted the distressed families back in Odisha. Upon receiving the phone call, the mothers rushed to Chennai, emotionally reuniting with their sons on Saturday morning.
Although the exact reasons behind the boys’ journey, whether they were misguided or driven by other factors, remain unclear, the families expressed overwhelming relief and immense gratitude to Majhi, the public and the media. The mothers and their rescued sons were scheduled to board a train back to Odisha on Saturday evening.