46 Hours And Counting: Girl Stuck In Borewell, Robotic Experts Called In

Rescue agencies were still making hectic efforts for the third day to save a two-and-a-half year-old girl who fell into a borewell in Madhya Pradesh's Sehore district, an official said on Thursday.

A team of robotic experts also joined the operation on Thursday morning to rescue the girl, who fell into the 300-feet deep borewell in a field at Mungavali village on Tuesday afternoon, he said.

Oxygen was being supplied to the girl in the borewell through a pipe, district administration officials said.

With more than 46 hours passing away since the incident, the task to pull the girl out of the borewell has become more difficult as she has slipped further down and got stuck at a depth of nearly 100 feet, as per officials.

A three-member robotic rescue team from Gujarat reached the site on Thursday morning to join the operation, the official said.

"We have lowered a robot into the borewell to collect information and we are processing the data by scanning it to know the child's condition. After processing the data, we will decide the next course of action on how to rescue the girl from the borewell,” the robotic team in-charge Mahesh Arya told reporters at the site.

The girl, named Srishti, fell into the borewell at around 1 pm on Tuesday and since then efforts have been on to rescue her.

She was initially stuck at the depth of about 40 feet in the borewell, but due to vibrations caused by machines engaged in the rescue operation, she has slipped further down to about 100 feet, making the task more difficult, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Wednesday.

An Army team also joined the rescue operation, while teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the State Disaster Emergency Response Force (SDERF) have already been working to rescue the girl, officials said.

As many as 12 earth-moving and poclain machines are also currently engaged in the rescue operation, they said.

Chief Minister Chouhan and a team of officials are in touch with the district authorities to supervise the rescue operation, they said.

With the latest incident, the dangers posed by open and abandoned borewells have come to the fore again.

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, an official earlier said.

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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