The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Boy chasing kite falls into well, dies

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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Boy chasing kite falls into well, dies

Staff Reporter

Body retrieved after two days

CHENNAI: A 12-year-old boy who went chasing his kite fell into a deep well on the IIT-Madras premises on Wednesday. His body was taken out on Friday.

Manikandan, a class VI student of Corporation School in Taramani and his six-year-old sister Ranjitha, were playing near the compound wall of IIT on Wednesday . Their parents, Sekar and Mallika, are construction workers. The family lives in a hut abutting the compound wall.

At around 6.30 p.m. when the thread of the kite snapped, the boy told his sister that he would fetch the kite from the premises. When the parents returned home at around 9.30 p.m., they did not find their son and got worried.

Based on the information given by Ranjitha, they alerted the security staff in IIT, who informed the Kotturpuram police.

Fire service personnel began their search inside the institution around 11 p.m. Continuing with their search on Thursday, the fire service sent down a couple of swimmers when they found a thread hanging from the grill of an old well.

“It is a well dug up for agricultural purpose. The institution has put an iron grill but there is a small opening. The boy must have slipped through the grill while trying to retrieve his kite,” according to a police officer .

The rescue efforts were hampered as the well contained thorny bushes that had been submerged in the recent rain. Fire service personnel tried to pump out water using a motor. But the motor could not pump out all the water. On Friday morning, the fire service personnel brought in eight swimmers from the Guindy range and after a four-hour ordeal Manikandan’s body was taken out.

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