“A two-year old boy fell into a 15-feet-deep borewell in Gujarat’s Jamnagar district following which rescue teams rushed to the spot and pulled him out alive after a six-hour operation,” officials said on February 7.
Jamnagar Collector B. K. Pandya said the boy fell into the open borewell at a farm land in Govana village at around 6 p.m. on February 6. The boy, son of a farm labourer, was playing in the field when the incident took place.
“Rescue teams comprising the district fire and emergency services personnel rushed to the site,” Mr. Pandya said. “They supplied oxygen into the borewell and a parallel pit was dug to reach the child,” officials said.
“The boy was pulled out at around 12.30 a.m. 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 ft. 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 ft, 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.
