The weeklong operation to bring out six-year-old Timmanna Hatti from the open borewell in Sulikeri village of Badami taluk reached an emotional end in the early hours of Monday, with the district administration succeeding in retrieving the remains of the boy using a high-power air compressor.
The grief-stricken family performed the last rites at the site soon after the autopsy. Timmanna had fallen into the borewell in the farm belonging to his father, Hanumantappa Hatti, on August 3. The district administration had since then made relentless efforts to rescue the boy.
Timanna’s family-his parents and two sisters-accepted the death of the boy as their “fate”. With the rescue operations having destroyed a good portion of the standing sugarcane crops, leaving a huge crater on his seven-acre farm, Hanumantappa is hoping that the government will fill it up and make it fit for cultivation soon.
The boy was stuck at a depth of around 150 ft, making rescue operations extremely difficult. The efforts to create a parallel trench to retrieve him was abandoned after soil experts said further digging could cause the vertical mud wall to collapse. The father had also appealed to the government to abandon operations, believing there was little hope of seeing his son alive and witnessing the gradual destruction of his farm.
Though the digging stopped on Saturday, the Advocate-General advised the State to look at alternative methods to retrieve the boy, who was assumed dead, so as to perform the autopsy.
On Sunday night, work resumed, this time using high-powered suction machines and an air compressor. After hours of struggle, the personnel retrieved a portion of the decomposed body.
There were heart-wrenching scenes as the family was handed over the mortal remains of Timmanna, wrapped in a white cloth. The mother, Sangavva, was inconsolable and said she was not lucky enough to “see the face of her son” for the last time.
The family had spent hours at the site of the rescue operations and had begun to lose hope as the days went by. It was then that the family began fervently urging the government to stop the rescue operations as the digging work was destroying their farm.
