Sunita Goel, who lost her 20-year-old daughter on Wednesday to a spell of snow in Nainital, is at a loss of what to do with the pictures, toys and clothes that her daughter has left behind. She opens Priyanka’s closet in her house in Dadri, Ghaziabad, points to the rows of new clothes hanging inside and wails, “I nurtured her for 20 years and now she is gone. She went to Nainital without knowing that the mountains will eat her up. What do I do with these now?”

Priyanka was a student of the Institute of Management Studies, Ghaziabad. She died of chill in Nainital on Wednesday after she went out for a trek without wearing adequate woollens with 84 other batchmates. Priyanka’s classmate and friend Kanika also lost her life in the incident.

In Cheeranjiv Vihar, Kanika’s father Nand Kishore says his daughter was going to get her driving licence on Friday. “She wanted to drive a car and we had a deal that after she came back from the trip, we would get her a driving licence,” he says.

Both girls left their houses on Tuesday morning and were scheduled to return on Thursday evening.

The director of IMS, A K Bhardwaj, said it was a freak “natural disaster” that led to the girls’ deaths. Their families, however, feel their daughters could have been saved if the college administration had tried enough.

They have now filed a complaint of negligence at Haldwani Police Station in Nainital against the institute, the travel agency and the Dynasty Resort, where the girls were staying.

“I want the people involved punished as they could have saved her life,” says Sunita. She rushed to Nainital on Wednesday evening along with husband Vinod and Kanika’s father Nand Kishore, after receiving a call from the college authorities that their daughters were “ill”.

Their daughters had died when they reached the hospital. There was no one from the institute to help the girls, Sunita claimed. Two other students admitted at the hospital told them that most students caught severe colds following a sudden hail and snowfall while they were trekking. These students purportedly told them that Kanika and Priyanka’s health started deteriorating after they had coffee after coming back to the resort. “They were caught in the snow in the morning, but were taken to the hospital after four to five hours. If only they had been taken earlier, our children might have been saved,” says Nand Kishore.