Girl, 2, who fell into 200-foot-deep borewell in Gujarat's Jamnagar dies, body recovered

Despite the hectic rescue efforts by multiple agencies for a span of 19 hours, a two-year-old girl who had accidentally fallen into a narrow borewell and got stuck at a depth of 20 feet in an agricultural field in Gujarat's Jamnagar district died, an official said on Sunday.

The toddler, hailing from a tribal family that worked as laborers on a farm in Tamachan village, approximately 40km away from Jamnagar city, had fallen into the depths of a 200-foot-deep borewell while playing around at 9.30am on Saturday.

A massive operation involving the Army, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and local fire personnel was launched to rescue the girl.

She was brought out at around 5.45 am on Sunday and declared dead, Jamnagar taluka development officer N A Sarvaiya said.

Earlier, as soon as the local administration got information about the incident, it launched a rescue operation involving fire department personnel at around 11am on Saturday, Sarvaiya said.

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

In July 2022, a 12-year-old girl fell into a borewell at a village in Gujarat's Surendranagar district and got stuck at a depth of 60 feet, but was rescued nearly five hours later.

On June 9 last year, a two-year-old boy fell into a borewell at a farm in Surendranagar, following which a team of the Army, fire brigade, police and health officials rushed to the spot and rescued him.

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.