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Operation Sujith: No way out of killer wells

TRICHY/CHENNAI: It has taken another innocent toddler’s fatal plunge to expose the state government’s continuing apathy towards recurring incidents of abandoned wells becoming death traps for children . Lack of enforcement of rules including the Supreme Court’s series of guidelines on abandoned borewells and the safety measures has only been reinforced.

This time around, the government agencies also revealed how clueless they are in handling a disaster of this scale as shown by its late reaction to an early offer by the National Disaster Response Force to help. One only hopes that the Nadukattupatti incident will find solutions to such failings.


The state may not have forgotten a four-year-old P Devi rescued after a 11-hour operation from a 300-ft borewell at Arni in Tiruvannamalai in 2013. She died in hospital later. Four-year-old Harshan was pulled out of a 400-ft borewell successfully after a six-hour struggle in Kuthalaperi village near Sankarankoil, but three-year-old R Madhumita died after a 19-hour-ordeal to rescue her from a 500ft borewell in Pallakatcheri village in Villupuram. Both incidents happened in 2014 but these are only some of the cases. Neither the owners of the wells nor the enforcement agencies seem to be serious about the gravity of the problem and periodical inspections are also given a miss despite a law being in place. On Friday, a team of NDMA, ONGC and NLC joined the rescue operation along with state agencies.

Individuals and groups wake up and manage with indigenous equipment to rescue children when an incident strikes. Health minister C Vijayabaskar said the government would mull over inventing advanced equipment in future. “Though it is the time to focus on rescuing the baby safely, there is no second thought about working on some plans to research on the matter and invent a new way for rescuing children from borewells,” he told TOI. District administrators in private say the local bodies fail to monitor the wells in the neighbourhood and act stringently when the drought-hit state sees more sinking of wells.

Karur MP S Jothimani, in whose jurisdiction Nadukattupatti falls, said she would raise the issue in Parliament. “I will draw national-level attention to the issue and find a solution,” the Congress MP said. Following the SC order , the Congress-led UPA regime shot off a communication to all states on July 24, 2012 to take appropriate action on the safety measures and guidelines on abandoning of borewells to avoid accidents. Though equipped for rescue operations during disasters like floods, NDRF team also was struggling to rescue Sujith from the narrow borewell. “We try our best,” said an NDRF member at Nadukattupatti. Mamallan, a social worker from Pudukkottai, even volunteered to rescue the child manually by sending a lean boy into the well.

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