VIJAYAWADA: A six-year-old boy drowned after he accidentally fell into an overflowing open drain while playing near his house in Vijayawada on Friday. The boy’s body was recovered one-and-half kilometres from the place where he had slipped into the drain following two hours of the rescue operation.
According to locals, the deceased boy, T Abhiram, was playing with three of his friends behind the NAK Kalyanamandapam in Prakasam Colony. The children were playing near the drain after heavy rain subsided last morning. While they were dropping paper boats into the gushing rainwater, Abhiram slipped into the drain. Though two of the boys tried catching hold of him, the six-year-old was washed away in the overflowing drain. The boys immediately alerted Abhiram’s parents, who alerted the police.
Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC) staff, fire services and police personnel rushed to the spot and launched a search operation for the missing boy. Scavengers, experts in rescue operations and silt-removing teams were pressed into service to search for the boy.
The rescue workers found the boy 1.5 km downstream at Bharat Nagar.“On removing nearly four buckets of trash at Bharat Nagar, I saw a shirt tangled to a nail, which belonged to Abhiram. I immediately alerted my superiors who called the cops. Later, we took out the boy from the drain, however, he had died by then,’’ Naveen, a VMC worker who found Abhiram’s body said. The boy’s parents, Teki Veera Babu and Nukaratnam, remained inconsolable. Though the couple hails from Ramavaram in East Godavari district, Veera Babu works as a labourer at Autonagar.
“I was busy with household chores and did not notice when Abhiram stepped out to play. I came to know about the incident when his friends informed me that he fell into the drain,” said an emotional Nukaratnam speaking to TNIE. According to authorities, the 10-foot wide and 5-feet deep drain was a canal meant for agricultural purposes in the past. However, with the expansion of the city, it turned into an open drain and several families began living along it.
Allu Lakshmi, the neighbour of the deceased, said, “This is the first incident I have seen in the past six years after we settled behind NAK Kalyanamandapam. The authorities should cover the drain to ensure such incidents are prevented.’’
Vijayawada East MLA Gadde Ramamohan squarely blamed the State government and the civic body for the death of the boy. “We got Rs 500 crore allocated for the construction of stormwater drains by VMC during the previous TDP regime. Only Rs 200 crore was spent,’’ he alleged.
Mayor Rayani Bhagya Lakshmi, Commissioner Swapnil Dinakar Pundkar and officers visited the spot and inquired about the cause of the incident. Commissioner Swapnil Dinakar Pundkar expressed his grief and said the parents should take care of their children, especially during rain, and assured them that the drain would be covered with cement lids or iron mesh.
Meanwhile, the family members of the deceased along with CPM State Executive Committee member CH Babu Rao staged a protest at GGH Vijayawada demanding ex-gratia to the kin of the deceased.