Race against time to save five-year-old boy stuck in well in India
Boy appears to be unconscious, officials say, as rescue operation enters third day
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Your support makes all the difference.A rescue operation is underway to save a five-year-old boy who fell into a 150ft borewell in western India three days ago.
Aryan Meena was playing in a field when he fell down the narrow borewell in Dausa city in Rajasthan state at around 3.15pm on Monday, his father Jagdish Meena told reporters.
A city official said the boy appeared to be lying unconscious and rescue workers had pushed down a pipe to supply oxygen.
They had also sent down a CCTV camera to monitor his condition.
The presence of water at the base of the well and cold winter conditions in northern India posed risks to the boy’s survival, complicating the rescue effort.
Grainy CCTV footage showed the boy covered in mud and stuck in a narrow tunnel as a rope and pipes dangled above him.
City official Devendra Kumar Yadav said rescue workers started vertical drilling at 3am on Wednesday to rescue the child through a parallel tunnel.
They had drilled down to around 110ft and needed to go another 40-50ft to reach the boy.
“The child appears to be in an unconscious state and his condition is being monitored through CCTV,” Mr Yadav told local reporters. “It will be possible to comment on Aryan’s health only after he is rescued.”
“We were encountering problems in rescue work, so vertical drilling was started. We will try and reach the child through horizontal drilling.”
State emergency personnel were working with the National Disaster Response Force to bring the child out safely, he said.
This is not the first incident of a child falling into a borewell in India.
Farmers in India resort to digging deep borewells to extract water for irrigation and drinking due to water scarcity in many regions of the country. The wells are often left abandoned and unchecked if they run low or develop other problems, which then poses a risk to local residents – children in particular.
In 2006, a six-year-old boy named Prince fell inside an open borewell in an incident that garnered international attention as the rescue operation continued for days. He was brought out safely after around 50 hours.
In 2019, three-year-old Sujith Wilson fell inside a 600ft borewell in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirappalli. He could not be rescued and was brought out dead after an 80-hour ordeal.
In 2022, eight-year-old Tanmay Sahu died in Madhya Pradesh despite a 65-hour rescue operation to save him. A year later, Shrishti Kushwaha, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, could not be rescued alive in the same state.
According to data from the National Disaster Response Force, at least 40 children fell into borewells over a decade until 2019, and nearly 70 per cent of the rescue operations to save them failed.
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