A 23-year-old student from Telangana has gone missing in Boston in the United States after stepping out of her home for an evening walk, and her family back in India is waiting anxiously for news five days after she was last seen.
The Boston Police Department has issued a missing-person alert and appealed to the public for help in tracing her, while a Telangana minister has sought the intervention of the Indian consulate, the Ministry of External Affairs and the American authorities.
The missing student has been identified as Koya Sreeja Reddy, a native of Shabdullapuram village in Kanagal mandal of Nalgonda district in Telangana. She had travelled to the United States around a year and a half ago to pursue higher education and was studying for a master's degree at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She was also working part-time while studying, her family said.
Sreeja was last seen on the night of Monday, 2 November, when she left her residence in the Edison Green area of Dorchester in Boston at around 9.45 pm. According to her family, she had attended college that day, returned to her room, and then stepped out for a walk. She did not return. Her mobile phone has remained switched off since then, and no one in her family or among her friends has heard from her since.
Her friends and roommates reported her disappearance to the police on 3 November. On 4 November, the Boston Police Department issued an official missing-person alert, asking the public for assistance in locating her. The alert carries incident number 2026-00738. Police said they were actively working to locate Sreeja and urged anyone with information about her whereabouts to call the emergency number 911 or to contact District C-11 detectives in Dorchester on (617) 343-4335.
The police have given some details of her last known movements. Her last known location, traced through her mobile phone, was in the vicinity of Carson Beach or Harbor Point, and the authorities believe she may be in that area. She was described by the Boston Police Department as an Indian woman of slim build with black hair, between 5 feet 3 inches and 5 feet 5 inches tall.
Reports in the Indian media, quoting her friends, said she had been seen walking barefoot by patrolling police officers after she left her apartment, a detail that has added to her family's worry.
For her parents, the days since her disappearance have been an ordeal of waiting. Her father, Koyya Yadagiri Reddy, a farmer, said the family had received no information about their daughter since she went missing. Her mother, Swaroopa Reddy, spoke of her last conversation with Sreeja.
The student had told her mother that she would eat shortly and sleep early. There was a birthday party at her residence that evening, and Sreeja had planned to attend it. The next call Swaroopa received was the news that her daughter had not come back.
Her friends told her mother that Sreeja had stepped out for a walk after returning from college and had simply not returned. "We were surprised that she went for a walk at night. She is usually careful," Swaroopa said.
The disappearance has also drawn the attention of political leaders in Telangana. Komatireddy Venkat Reddy, the state's Minister for Roads and Buildings and the MLA from Nalgonda, has sought the assistance of the Consulate General of India in Boston, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Boston Police Department in efforts to trace the missing student.
He also contacted members of the Telugu Association of North America, known as TANA, to help coordinate efforts on the ground among the Telugu community in the Boston area.
In a message posted on the social media platform X, the minister said he was deeply concerned about the reported disappearance of Sreeja Reddy Koya, a student from Nalgonda studying at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He urged the Indian consulate in Boston, the Indian embassy in Washington, the External Affairs Ministry and the Boston Police to coordinate urgently and to ensure that every effort was made to trace her safely.
The case is one more reminder of the anxieties that accompany the large number of Indian students who study abroad. Thousands of young Indians travel to the United States every year for higher education, often living far from their families for the first time.
When something goes wrong, their families in India must depend on a chain that runs through local police in a foreign city, the Indian consulate, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi and community organisations of the Indian diaspora. In Sreeja's case, that chain is now in motion, with the Boston Police leading the search and Indian officials pressing for updates.
The timeline of the case underlines how quickly a routine evening turned into an emergency. Sreeja left home at around 9.45 pm on 2 November. Her disappearance was reported the next day, 3 November, and the formal police alert followed on 4 November.
By the time the story reached the Indian media on 7 November, five days had passed since she was last seen, and her phone had been unreachable throughout. Each of those days has added to the distress of a family that can only follow the search from a village in Nalgonda district, thousands of kilometres away.
The involvement of the Telugu Association of North America reflects how diaspora organisations often become the first point of contact for families in such cases, helping with local coordination while the official channels work through the consulate and the ministry.
The Indian Consulate General in Boston is the office responsible for assisting Indian nationals in the region, and the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi coordinates such cases with foreign authorities when a citizen goes missing abroad. In this instance, the minister's appeal named both, along with the Boston Police, in an effort to make sure the search does not lose momentum as the days pass.
For now, the search continues in Boston, focused on the Dorchester neighbourhood and the Carson Beach and Harbor Point areas where her phone was last traced. Her family in Shabdullapuram waits for the phone to ring. Her father said it had been his dream to see his daughter do well in her studies, a dream that had taken her across the world to a university in Boston. Five days after she walked out of her home for an evening walk, that dream hangs on any scrap of news.
Anyone with information about Sreeja Koya's whereabouts has been asked to contact the Boston Police Department on 911 or District C-11 detectives in Dorchester on (617) 343-4335.
(Reporting based on NDTV and The Indian Express.)