A four-year-old boy has died after falling into a 70-metre-deep borewell in the northern Indian state of Haryana, despite a 21-hour rescue operation involving the army, national disaster response crews and local authorities that made headlines throughout the country.
Nirvair Singh fell into the borewell at around 6.30am on Tuesday in Dhaneora village in Ambala district while accompanying his father to deliver food to his grandfather in the family's fields.
The child wandered off to play and was seen throwing soil into an open borewell before leaning over to look inside. The wet ground around the opening gave way, and he fell in. His family heard a sound, rushed to the borewell and called out to him. After failing to reach him, they alerted authorities at around 7.30am.
Rescue personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force, and the army launched an extensive operation not long after.
Nirvair was pulled out at around 3.40am on Wednesday, more than 21 hours after he had fallen in, and taken by ambulance to the Civil Hospital in Ambala Cantonment, where doctors declared him dead on arrival.
The borewell was nine inches in diameter and around 70 metres deep, Ambala’s deputy commissioner said.
The tragedy has returned attention to the longstanding challenge of open borewells. Several cases of children falling into them have drawn media attention over the years. In 2006, Prince, 5, was rescued alive after 48 hours in Kurukshetra, Haryana, in what became India's first nationally televised rescue operations.
In the two decades since, dozens of children have fallen into abandoned or uncovered borewells in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab. Some survived. Many did not.
Just last month, a four-year-old boy was rescued alive after falling into a borewell in Hoshiarpur, Punjab.
In 2019, toddler Fatehveer Singh spent more than 100 hours trapped in a borewell in Punjab's Sangrur district before succumbing.
Across India, thousands of borewells are drilled every year for agricultural and drinking water needs. When a borewell stops yielding water, it’s usually abandoned rather than sealed, sometimes covered with loose wooden planks or plastic sheets but often left completely open.
Though the Supreme Court has issued guidelines requiring unused borewells to be sealed and fenced, enforcement has been inconsistent, with responsibility split among landowners, contractors and local authorities.
The deputy commissioner said police had been directed to take action against those responsible for leaving the borewell open and appealed to farmers not to leave wells uncovered. "The tragedy could have been prevented had the borewell been properly sealed," he said.
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