How a 70-year-old survived 3 hours in sunken boat at Madhya Pradesh's Jabalpur dam

JABALPUR: An upper-deck seat on the Madhya Tourism cruise on the Bargi dam reservoir cost Rs 160. You had to pay more to be on the lower deck – Rs 200. Most of the lower deck was underwater, so one could even see the fish outside its floor-to-ceiling glass walls.

On April 30, a 70-year-old former work manager at Khamaria Ordnance factory, Syed Riaz Hussain, bought four tickets for the lower deck – for his wife Reshma (65), his daughter’s mother-in-law Shamim Naqvi (65), and his 13-year-old grandson Zafar, and himself.



No one then could have imagined how their lives would change unrecognisably in the next few hours, with two of the four among the 13 people who died in the boat capsize and Hussain being the last person to be rescued.

At 8.30pm, when rescuers finally found the boat, lying upside down by the reservoir’s shore in inky darkness, Riyaz was the only survivor still on the boat. He was clinging to an iron angle on the floor of the boat. But the floor was now the ceiling.

“There was absolute darkness around me. I was just waiting for the end,” he said.

For two hours, he had clung on for dear life. But he had seen his wife Reshma and his daughter’s mother-in-law Shamim drown. He had no idea what had happened to his grandson Zafar.

And he thought it would soon be all over for him, too. In the upturned boat, most of the lower deck was now submerged. Someone – one would only know this later – had managed to break a part of the glass. Through this, some had escaped to safety. But others, like his wife Reshma, had drowned as water rushed in through the broken glass.

Meanwhile, Riyaz held on to the iron angle in one corner of the lower deck that was 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. Most of his body was submerged, but his head was above water. He was also lucky that some fresh air was coming in through a small hole in the metal floor that was now above him.

For nearly two hours, he kept banging on the floor-roof, hoping someone would hear him. “Every moment felt like waiting for death,” he said.

Around 8.30pm, he heard faint noises outside. Gathering whatever strength he had left, he began hitting the floor-roof again. “That’s when I heard a voice from outside saying someone is alive inside,” he said.