A 2-year-old boy was safely retrieved out of a 15-feet-deep pit in a 6-hour operation in Gujarat’s Jamnagar.
The boy fell into an open borewell pit following which rescue teams rushed to the spot and pulled him out alive, officials said on Wednesday.
Jamnagar Collector BK Pandya said the boy, son of a farm labourer, fell into the pit while playing at a farm land in Govana village of the district around 6 pm on Tuesday.
Rescue teams comprising the district fire and emergency services personnel rushed to the site, supplied oxygen into the borewell and a parallel pit was dug to reach the child, he said.
The boy was pulled out around 12.30 am on Wednesday.
He was rushed to a government hospital in Jamnagar where he was undergoing treatment, the collector said.
With the latest incident, the dangers posed by open and abandoned borewells have come to the fore again.
Earlier, three-year-old girl died after falling into a borewell in Devbhumi Dwarka district of Gujarat on January 1.
In June last year, a two-year-old girl slipped into a narrow borewell at Tamachan village in Jamnagar district and got stuck at a depth of 20-feet.
She died despite hectic rescue efforts by multiple agencies for 19 hours.
In July 2022, a 12-year-old girl fell into a borewell at a village in Gujarat’s Surendranagar district and got stuck at a depth of 60 feet, but was rescued nearly five hours later.
On June 9, 2022, a two-year-old boy fell into a borewell at a farm in Surendranagar, following which a team of the Army, fire brigade, police and health officials rushed to the spot and rescued him.
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.
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