According to authorities on Thursday, police have filed a complaint against a professor at IIT Delhi for suspected carelessness after a female PhD student died during excavation work close to the Lothal archeological site in Gujarat last year.

Although the event happened on November 27 of last year, close to the Harappan-era archeological site, the student’s father filed a complaint, and on March 23 the First Information Report (FIR) was filed at the Koth police station in the Ahmedabad district, according to sub-inspector PN Gohil.

A 10-foot-deep excavation hole fell on Surabhi Verma, a 23-year-old PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, when she and her professor Yama Dixit were inside the pit gathering soil samples for their paleoclimatic research in Lothal, which is about 80 kilometers from Ahmedabad.

Dixit was pulled from the fallen hole, but Surabhi perished instantly. The Koth police have charged Dixit with causing death by carelessness after receiving a complaint from Surabhi’s father, Ramkhelavan Verma. As of now, no one has been arrested,” Gohil said.

Dixit has been charged under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s sections 106 (causing death by carelessness) and 125 (endangering the life or personal safety of others). After earning a M Tech in Earth Sciences, Surabhi Verma enrolled as a PhD student at IIT Delhi in December 2023, according to the FIR. Verma and Dixit traveled to Gujarat in November 2024 to do research.

According to the FIR, the two traveled to Lothal on November 27 to gather samples with a professor and a student from IIT Gandhinagar.

They arrived at the location and engaged an earthmover operator to dig a 10-foot-deep trench next to a road that goes past the archeological remnants of the Harappan port town of Lothal in Ahmedabad’s Dholka taluka.