Tasvani Udayanshi Pathak is dead, her small body crushed between the rear of a school van and the concrete boundary wall of her home at 1:45 pm on Thursday. The 8-year-old, a Class 3 student at Delhi Public School in Prayagraj, was retrieving her bag from the vehicle's storage compartment when the driver put the vehicle in reverse. The impact was immediate and fatal; despite the screams of other children aboard the van, Tasvani was trapped under the chassis until neighbors pulled her free. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, but doctors could only pronounce her dead.
The tragedy unfolded in front of the family's home in Gorakhpur, where Tasvani lived with her grandparents, Surendra and Kadambini Pathak. Her father, Manish Pathak, works in Delhi, and her mother, Aarti Dubey, teaches in a government school in Gorakhpur. The family had hired a private van for her daily commute, a service that failed catastrophically in the matter of seconds. CCTV footage from the area now captures the incident, showing the child still at the rear of the vehicle as it began to move backward.
Chaos erupted on the street as residents realized the driver was attempting to flee the scene. A group of locals and passersby physically restrained the driver before he could drive away, leading to his swift arrest by the police station team. The other children in the van were safely transferred to a different vehicle and sent home. DCP Yamunanagar Vivek Chandra Yadav confirmed that both the van and the driver have been taken into custody, with a formal investigation launched to determine the extent of negligence.
The incident has cast a shadow over the safety protocols of private school transport in the region. For now, the Pathak family is left to process the loss of their only child, while police work to establish whether the driver failed to check the rear blind spot or if other mechanical or operational failures contributed to the death.