As the nation prays for Tamil Nadu toddler Sujith who remains trapped in a 600-ft borewell, the incident has many people in Madhya Pradesh recalling the horror when another child, Roshan from Dewas district, was trapped in a 40-ft deep open borewell for more than 34 hours in 2018.
On 10th March that year, four-year-old Roshan, the son of a farm labourer Bhim Singh from Umriya village, was playing near his house when he fell into a freshly dug borewell.
According to a Hindustan Times report, the rescue operation which started an hour after the incident saw the combined efforts of a 60-member-team of the army's engineering wing and 15 people from the state disaster response force along with local authorities and police personnel.
Initially, the rescue team found it difficult to reach the child due to the presence of hard rock. According to Ashish Singh, the-then collector of Dewas district, the team had thought of using dynamite in a small dose to crack open the rock but abandoned the plan as it would have endangered the boy's life.
It was nighttime when the authorities decided to lower a rope into the borewell which was held by the boy as rescue team members pulled him out. While the operation was in progress, Roshan, whose condition was monitored by a camera, was fed milk through a pipe.
Earth-moving machines were also deployed to dig parallelly along the borewell to reach Roshan, who was finally rescued the following night. After the toddler was rescued, he was promptly checked by medical staff on the spot and rushed to a hospital in Khategaon.