Alert utility men save twins drowning in society’s pool

PUNE: Two samaritans jumped into a housing society’s swimming pool and rescued two minor girls minutes after they fell into it while playing nearby at H M Royale, a gated housing society opposite Talab company in Kondhwa, around 11.45am on Sunday.

Eight-year-old twins Batul and Hussaina were admitted to Ruby Hall Clinic in Wanowrie. “Batul’s condition is serious. She is undergoing treatment at the intensive care unit. She has been put on a ventilator. The condition of Hussaina has improved. She has been shifted from the ICU to the general ward,” the hospital’s chief executive officer Bhomi Bhote said on Monday.

Both are students of standard III of an English medium school in Kondhwa.

“My daughters were playing near the stairs outside our building when I told my son to call them home for lunch. He went down and rushed back saying that his sisters had drowned in the pool and were taken to a nearby private hospital,” the girl’s mother, Munnarasa Babarwala, told TOI.

“I am not an eyewitness to what happened. The society’s residents told me that a domestic help was cleaning the balcony when she saw the girls struggling to stay afloat in the pool. She told her employer who in turn alerted a security guard and the others. Somebody rescued my daughters and took them to a nearby hospital,” she said, adding that in her state of shock she had not thought of thanking the saviours in person.

Sagar Shewale was one of the two men who jumped into the pool.“I was reading and collecting the bills of domestic gas supplied via pipeline from the flat owners. I heard the cries of a domestic help and I rushed out of the building and saw one of the two girls had gone under water while the other was floating. My friend Vijay Jagtap and I jumped into the pool and pulled them out and pumped out the water from their body. One of the girls regained consciousness. But the other girl took sometime to come back. A flat owner then rushed them to hospital. A CCTV camera that captured the image shows that the girls had been in the pool for three minutes. We rescued them in one minute,” he said.

Rahul Patil, project head of HM Royale, told TOI,“The girls first opened the door and walked into the club house. They went to the washroom and returned to play. They again walked into club house saying they wanted to use the washroom but they instead stepped into the 1.2m deep pool. The parents have no complaints because it was an accident.”

Senior inspector Anil Patil, in-charge of the Kondhwa police station, said,”No case has been registered. We have made an entry about it in the general diary or station diary.”