Another borewell tragedy
Exposing criminal negligence and apathy, abandoned borewells, wells and pits unfortunately continue to remain live death traps across India. Despite tall declarations by the authorities concerned after every such accident of ensuring that all the spots would be securely plugged so that no one else falls into these dark fatal holes and punishing those found lax, the ground reality remains largely unchanged. The major cause of these mishaps involving children playing in the area — mostly labourers’ kids — is the borewells having been left uncovered or covered with a light cloth or sack that fails to bear their weight. Plus, such dangerous spots neither have warning signs posted around them nor are they barricaded as precautionary and preventive measures.
While the harrowing memory of two-year-old Fatehveer Singh’s death due to his ill-fated fall in 2019 into a 100-foot open borewell in Bhagwanpura, Punjab, is still fresh, now, Hoshiarpur’s six-year-old Hrithik Roshan has met with a similar fate as his limp body was taken out after much effort. The same day, Haryana’s Hisar saw two farmers being trapped in an abandoned well as its wall caved in after they had descended in to install an electric motor for water extraction. The year 2019 witnessed two more tragedies. Even as Seema (4) in Jodhpur met her grave in a sunken pit, two-year-old Sujith Wilson’s body was retrieved from a borewell in Tamil Nadu in a decomposed and dismembered state after an 82-hour-long struggle.
Efforts by various teams, including the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), to bring the victims out alive generally have not been successful due to the tough conditions in which the rescue operation takes place. As per an NDRF report, between 2009 and 2019, more than 40 children fell into borewells and the rescue operations were successful in less than one-third cases. Prince of Kurukshetra in Haryana is one of the lucky kids as he was pulled out alive in 2006. Undoubtedly, the only way to prevent such tragedies is to seal all borewells not in use and hold local and district officials responsible for keeping them shut.
