Boy, 5, stuck in 150ft well for three days declared dead after being pulled out
He was pulled out after a 56-hour rescue operation
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Your support makes all the difference.A five-year-old boy was declared dead after being pulled out of a 150ft-borewell in western India following a 56-hour rescue operation.
Aryan Meena, who lived in the Dausa district of Rajasthan state, was trapped in the narrow well for three days after falling into it while playing on Monday afternoon.
The boy, wearing pants and a t-shirt, had to endure plummeting winter temperatures inside the well as well as hunger and thirst.
Children and even adult people dying from falling into open borewells is not uncommon in rural India where they are dug to pump water for irrigation and drinking and left abandoned after they run dry.
The boy fell inside the uncovered well at around 3pm on 9 December and villagers reported hearing his screams.
The rescue team that brought him out said he was trapped between old pipes.
Rescue workers sent an oxygen pipe down to help him breathe as well as a CCTV camera to monitor his condition.
They started digging a vertical tunnel parallel to the well on Tuesday night after initial efforts to pull him out with a rope and other methods failed.
The boy was declared to be in an unconscious state on Tuesday night after no movement was noticed.
National and state disaster response teams engaged in the rescue said they encountered multiple challenges during the operation, including a technical fault in a drilling machine.
The child was pulled out after an almost 56-hour rescue operation that ended at around 11pm on Wednesday.
He was unconscious and a road was cleared to take him to hospital in an ambulance for timely treatment. However, he was declared dead after a series of tests.
“The child was rushed to the district hospital in an ambulance that had an advanced life support system but he was already dead,” police said.
"The child was brought here so that we could try and revive him if possible. However, we declared him dead after conducting the ECG test twice on him,” Deepak Sharma, chief medical officer of Government District Hospital Dausa said.
“From our initial examination, it appears he might have hit a hard object or sustained some kind of injury when he fell.”
He said the cause of death would be confirmed by the autopsy.
In recent years, cases of children falling into wells have been reported from across the country.
In April this year, a six-year-old was pulled dead from a borewell after a 40-hour rescue mission in central Madhya Pradesh state. The death prompted chief minister Mohan Yadav to suspend two senior district officials for alleged negligence.
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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