Toddler, who fell into borewell in Gujarat’s Amreli, dies after being trapped for 17 hours

The girl, identified as Aarvi, fell into the borewell while she was playing with three other children on a farmland owned by one Bhanu Kakadiya at around 12 pm on Friday. She got stuck at a depth of approximately 50 feet inside the well.

Amreli fire brigade had rushed to the spot and launched a rescue operation. At around 8 pm on Friday, a team of National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) from Gandhinagar had also joined the ops.

“After the overnight rescue operation which went on for almost 17 hours, we managed to pull the girl out of the borewell at 5:10 am in an unconscious condition. A medical team, which was present at the spot, immediately attended to her and rushed her to the Amreli civil hospital. However, she was declared dead on arrival by doctors at the hospital,” Harikrushna Gadhvi, the fire officer of Amreli, told The Indian Express on Saturday.

The girl’s father, Karan Amaliyar, is a tribal hailing from Boriyala village in Dahod district’s Garbada taluka in eastern Gujarat. He and his family had been working as agricultural labourers on Kakadia’s farm for the past one month, Mukesh Bhuriya, a fellow worker, said.

Praveen Poonia, the assistant commandant of the 6th battalion of NDRF, explained the challenges faced during the rescue operation. “Some mud had fallen on the girl after the locals apparently tried to rescue her by excavating near the borewell. Therefore, the girl was not accessible initially to the rescuers. Secondly, her hands were in a normal position, that is parallel to her torso. Due to that, we were not able to grab hold of her hands with the normal hooks-and-rod mechanism,” Poonia said.

He added that the rescuers first shifted the soil down the borewell and then managed to reach the girl with rods and ropes.

Gadhvi further explained that two “J” hooks were fabricated on the spot after a computer-controlled robotic arm failed to pull the girl out. “Given the position of the girl inside the borewell, the robotic arm was not able to hold onto the girl tightly enough to pull her out. Therefore, two “J” hooks were fabricated with which we pulled the girl up by around four feet. Then NDRF managed to catch hold of her with an “L” hook and bring her to the surface.”

The toddler had fallen into the borewell when her parents were away sowing cotton in the farm. “We heard the cries of three children. We rushed to the spot and found that Aarvi was missing. The children told us that she had fallen into the borewell,” Bhuriya had told The Indian Express on Friday, adding, “We heard Aarvi’s cries for help from inside the borewell.”

Many tribals from eastern Gujarat, western Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra come to the Saurashtra region of Gujarat to work as agricultural labourers. Amreli sees the arrival of such labourers in huge numbers every monsoon.

Kalu Sabhaya, the sarpanch of Suragpura who was at the spot, had said that the girl’s cries were audible till around 3 pm on Friday.

On June 3 last year, a two-year-old girl had fallen into a borewell on an agricultural field in Tamachan village on the eastern outskirts of Jamnagar city. On January 1, a two-year-old girl fell in a borewell in the front yard of a house in Ran, a village in neighbouring Devbhumi Dwarka district, around 90 km west of Jamnagar city. The girl, despite being pulled out, didn’t survive. On February 6 this year, a two-year-old boy had died subsequently, despite being pulled out alive from inside a borewell in Govana village of Jamnagar district after a nine-hour-long operation.