A two-and-a-half-year-old girl, who fell into a 300-foot borewell in Sehore district of Madhya Pradesh, was pulled out by rescuers on Thursday evening after more than 52 hours of efforts, but was declared dead at a hospital soon later, officials said.
A police official said on the condition of anonymity that the girl already died in the borewell and when she was pulled out, her body was found decomposing.
The girl - Srishti - had fallen into the borewell in Mungavali village around 1 pm on Tuesday. She was pulled out at 5.30 pm on Thursday and was rushed to the district hospital in an ambulance for a check-up, where she was declared dead, another official said.
After the confirmation of her death, her body was sent for post-mortem, he said.
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Wednesday that the girl was initially stuck at 40 feet in the borewell and slid down further to 100 feet due to vibrations of machines used in the rescue operation. An official from the site on Thursday said the child had slipped further to around 135 feet before being pulled out.
Personnel from multiple agencies, including the Army, were in a race against time to save the girl, with oxygen being supplied to her through a pipe and rescuers facing the challenge of rain and gutsy winds since Thursday morning in the area.
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A team of robotic experts from Gujarat had joined the operation on Thursday morning to save the girl.
A robot was lowered into the borewell to collect information about the child's condition and the data was being used to contemplate the next course of action in the rescue operation, the robotic team in charge Mahesh Arya had told reporters at the site.
The rescue operation comprised personnel from the Army, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the State Disaster Emergency Response Force (SDERF) along with equipment, including 12 earth-movers, officials said.
The incident once again brought to the fore the dangers posed by open and abandoned borewells.
On Saturday, a two-year-old girl slipped into a narrow borewell in Gujarat's Jamnagar district and got stuck at a depth of 20-feet. She died despite hectic rescue efforts by multiple agencies for 19 hours.
In 2009, the Supreme Court issued guidelines for preventing fatal accidents of children falling into abandoned borewells.
The revised guidelines issued by the court in 2010 included setting up barbed wire fencing around the well during construction, using steel plate covers fixed with bolts over the well assembly and filling up of borewells from the bottom to the ground level.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
