Agencies/Manesar, Haryana
A four-day rescue mission to save a young girl who had fallen down a dry well in India ended unsuccessfully yesterday when her body was brought out by emergency services.
Mahi: tragic end
The efforts to save five-year-old Mahi Upadhyay were televised live by news channels, with people across the country performing religious rituals and offering prayers for her survival.
The girl fell down the borewell on June 20 while playing with her friends in a village in Harayana.
Hundreds of soldiers, engineers and medical experts were involved in the attempt to rescue her, using heavy machinery to dig a parallel tunnel to reach her as well as pumping oxygen into the well to try to keep her alive.
Her body was carried out yesterday wrapped in a blanket and taken to a nearby hospital where doctors declared her dead.
“Mahi was stuck at a level of 60ft. The diameter of the well was very narrow, nothing could be sent inside to save her,” senior police officer Anil Rao told reporters at the scene.
Her grieving parents were inconsolable. They accused the administration of delaying the rescue efforts.
“Who will give us back our daughter now?” asked her father Neeraj Upadhhyaya, soon after the ESI Hospital in Manesar town handed over to the family the body of the girl who fell into the well on the day she celebrated her birthday.
A senior army officer said the rescue operation was slowed down by the rocky terrain.
“We could not dig as fast as we wanted,” Brigadier S P Singh said. “There were too many rocks. We couldn’t blast them for fear of hurting our own men or the girl. This slowed down our work.”
Although the attempt to rescue the child was intensified after Delhi Metro and Haryana’s Rapid Metro brought in their specialised equipment, doctors said the girl may have died a long ago.
Seeing the decomposed state of her body, doctors felt she could have died on Wednesday night or Thursday.
“She may have died the same day or the next day,” Deepak Mathur, who along with B B Agrawal conducted the postmortem, said.
But the thousands gathered at the well site at the Industrial Model Township, where the girl’s father worked, were praying and hoping that the army would somehow succeed.
Soldiers had begun digging a parallel tunnel on Thursday morning but by Friday evening they were thoroughly exhausted, forcing the army officials to bring in a fresh military unit.
By late Thursday, worried army officers reported that a miniature camera dropped into the borewell was not showing any signs of movement by Mahi.
On Saturday, the army took help from a group of civilians adept at digging borewells and tunnels.
Finally, after nearly 90 agonising hours, a soldier and one of the civilian rescuers reached the spot where Mahi lay. The girl was gently lifted and rushed to the nearest hospital.
Mahi’s mother Sonia alleged that the family had been virtually kept under house arrest during the entire rescue operation.
She said she could only look at the operation from her window. “For the last few days, the district administration was not giving us any update on the rescue mission.”
Meanwhile, the country’s apex child rights panel has sought a report from the water resources ministry on abandoned borewells that have turned into death traps for children like Mahi.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) wrote to the ministry on Friday, two days after Mahi fell into the well.
lA teenaged boy fell into a 30ft-deep well in West Bengal’s Howrah district yesterday, a minister said. Roshan, 17, a construction worker, fell into the well around 4pm while trying to draw water, a witness said.
Disaster Management, Fire and Emergency Services Minister Javed Khan said: “The fire brigade personnel are making all efforts to rescue him quickly. The disaster management group personnel are being called.”
