A policeman's sharp eye saves a child's life

Sitting next to a window on board the Nilambur Road-Ernakulam passenger train, Aneesh Mon E.V., a senior civil police officer (SCPO), was gazing out when he saw in a flash a child walking on the railway tracks.

But, Aneesh wasn’t quite sure. It was around 7.50 p.m. and visibility was low.

“The train sped past a tyre manufacturing unit at Kalamassery as I asked around for confirmation. But nobody had seen it, except for an old man on the other side of the coach,” recalled Aneesh.

But even he could not confirm what he had seen. Aneesh, therefore, had no option but to rely on his instincts.

A saviour at junctures

An officer who successfully completed a programme in Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare at the North Eastern Police Academy, he is good at seeing almost everything he needs to see in crucial situations.

“A couple of minutes had gone by as I quickly searched out the local station’s contact number on the internet and alerted the police about a child standing alone on the railway track,” he said.

A police team was quickly dispatched to the location as specified by Aneesh and the child was tracked down within the next few minutes by the police. “But for Aneesh, the episode would definitely have had a tragic ending. He could alert us about the exact location of the child which was about a kilometre and half from the station. The information was crucial in tracking down the lost child in a timely manner,” said S. Jayakrishnan, Circle Inspector, Kalamassery.

Instead of rushing to the location directly in a police vehicle, the officers took a shortcut through the NAD region to reach the railway track and sprinted along the tracks for a few hundred metres southwards before locating the child.

“Reaching the location in our vehicle would have taken more time.

This would have proved too costly considering the high frequency of rail traffic along the route,” added the Circle Inspector.

As he alighted at Ernakulam, the first thing Aneesh did was to call up the station again and enquire about the child.

Relieved to hear about the child being rescued, Aneesh continued his journey to reach his spouse’s house near Vaikom late in the day.

The SCPO, attached to the Kerala Anti Terrorist Squad, is currently deployed at the Karuvarakundu police station in Malappuram.

The rescued child, one-and-a-half-year-old Devanarayanan, is the son of Manju and Sanjith, who shifted to the Kalamassery railway quarters a week ago.

The child was playing outside the quarters on his tricycle when it accidentally rolled down a slope.

The child fell down, and then walked towards the track trying to find his mother.

The mother, however, had gone in the opposite direction in search of the child.