A five-year-old boy who accidentally fell into an open borewell in a village in Satara district in Western Maharashtra died in the wee hours of Tuesday despite frenetic efforts to rescue him.
Mangesh Jadhav, the son of farm labourers from Virali village in Satara’s Maan tehsil, slipped into the borewell while playing on Monday afternoon.
Following this, local administration officials, along with medical and fire brigade teams, police personnel and members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) immediately launched an operation to rescue the boy.
However, by the time they pulled the child out at around 2 a.m. today morning, the boy had passed away.
“The child was pulled out at early morning from a depth of nearly 20 feet… his face was covered with mud and soil. He probably died of suffocation,” said assistant police inspector Malojirao Deshmukh of the Mhaswad police station.
Officials from the NDRF rescue team said that by the time the jawans reached the spot late Monday evening, a lot of mud had gone inside the hole as agitated people from the village too were making frantic efforts to rescue the child.
A case of accidental death has been registered and further investigations are on.