Race against time to rescue toddler stuck in MP borewell; Army called in

Sehore District Collector in charge Ashish Tiwari told The Indian Express, “We are working continuously. We have been able to reach about 30 feet. The NDRF team is adopting another conventional method. They are trying, they are taking time because of the hard rock. The difficulty we now face is that the hard rock seems to go for another 100 feet, and we are trying to save the child. She has not been responding and is unconscious.”

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan took stock of the situation and announced that he had called up the Army to assist in the rescue operations.

“The child, Srishti, had fallen into the borewell at the village yesterday. Efforts are on to rescue the her. She had fallen 40 feet, but during the digging due to the vibration, she has gone down a further 100 feet. We have called the Army. The NDRF and SDRF are also working. My thinking was that if the Army would join the rescue efforts, then we would be able to take the child out faster. We are making efforts to ensure that we extract the girl safely. Pray to god that we are successful in this,” the CM said.

VIDEO | Borewell rescue robot team arrives as efforts to pull out the 2.5-year-old girl from the borewell in Madhya Pradesh's Sehore district are still underway. pic.twitter.com/G6lqFdFk7G

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 8, 2023

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The girl’s mother, Rani, who was setting cow dung cakes when the incident took place, said, “She had come next to me and then ran away suddenly towards the borewell and fell into it.. We did not know there was a borewell there.” Srishti’s father was not at the time.

After the villagers fail to extract the girl, the local authority was pressed into action. Rescue teams had initially try to extract her with the help of a hook mechanism, but that was not successful.

The authorities then called in earth-moving machines and over a dozen excavators to dig a trench into the ground adjacent to the borewell in the hopes of digging a parallel tunnel.

Superintendent of Police Mayank Awasthi and other senior officers from the district have been monitoring the situation.

#WATCH | Operation continues in Mungaoli village of Sehore district to rescue a 2.5-year-old girl who fell into a borewell while playing in the field. #MadhyaPradesh pic.twitter.com/gZd6TPwKDx

— ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) June 7, 2023

Rescuers laid a camera cable into the borewell in the hopes of getting visuals of the child, but due to a lack of light, they were unable to get visuals of her.

“After we got the information, our teams kept working throughout the clock to rescue the child. The SDRF teams came and then the NDRF teams arrived soon after. The borewell is slender and had a narrow opening, so we dug up a parallel trench. We wanted to dig a horizontal tunnel and extract the child. Some hard rocks came in between, because of which the work was slow. We had to call in drill machines and over a dozen excavators to dig the tunnel faster,” SP Awasthi said.

Authorities have, in the meantime, have lowered oxygen tubes into the borewell in hopes of giving the girl a fighting chance. Ambulances have been deployed at the spot