A 13-year-old boy died after apparently being dragged under a moving passenger train while attempting to film a social-media reel near Talupalli village in Odisha’s Boudh district on Friday evening, police said. The incident has renewed concerns over dangerous stunts on railway tracks after the boy had reportedly been counselled by railway and local police for a similar video last year.
The incident occurred around 8.05 pm under the jurisdiction of Baunsuni police station. The Balangir-Purunakatak passenger train was travelling towards Boudh station when the boy was apparently on or near the railway track. Investigators suspect that some part of the train became caught on his body as it passed, according to the report. Police said they were still determining how he reached the track.
“We are yet to ascertain how he ended up on the railway track,” Mahendra Behera, inspector-in-charge of Baunsuni police station, told the Times of India. The boy was wearing grey pants and a blue T-shirt, police said.
According to local residents, the boy had returned home from a tuition class before taking money from his father and going to a shop. His parents later found that he was missing. Police subsequently recovered the body, which was handed over to his parents on Saturday after a postmortem examination, Behera said.
Police said the boy had appeared in a video that showed him lying between railway tracks while a train passed over him. Another minor had filmed that stunt, which later went viral on social media. The video surfaced in June last year, after which the Railway Protection Force, Government Railway Police and local police counselled the two minors, according to Behera.
The RPF registered a case against both minors on July 6 last year. Police also warned the boy’s parents about the potentially fatal consequences of repeating the act. Railway authorities conducted an awareness campaign in the area after the earlier video emerged, cautioning local youngsters against entering railway tracks or attempting dangerous stunts for online attention.
The death highlights the difficulty of enforcing railway safety beyond station premises, particularly when children access tracks in areas where regular public monitoring may be limited. It also shows the limits of one-time counselling and awareness drives when risky online content continues to circulate among young users. The immediate investigation remains focused on establishing the circumstances in which the boy reached the track and the sequence of events before the train passed.
Baunsuni police said the investigation was continuing. The authorities’ next step is to establish the circumstances of the incident based on the police inquiry and postmortem findings.
