Hubli: The seven-day operation to extract the six-year-old Timmanna Hatti, who is trapped in 160-foot borewell in Sulikeri village of Bagalkot district, ended with the government deciding to stop the rescue operation on Saturday.
After a meeting with the villagers and various organisations, the administration has started refilling the trench that was dug parallel to the borewell. The meeting also decided to return the farm land to the boy’s father Hanumanthappa in its original form by dumping on its surface around 100 lorry loads of fertile soil from lake basins to facilitate him to take up agriculture activity.
The government announced Rs 5 lakh compensation to the boy’s family and free education to the two daughters. It withdrew the decision to lodge criminal cases against Gram Panchayat members and officials.
Lauding the efforts made by the officials to rescue the boy, district in-charge minister S.R. Patil said that he will get legal opinion from the Advocate-General on the legal implications of stopping the rescue work.
The boy’s family, meanwhile, has decided to perform Timmanna’s last rites at borewell site.
“We have stopped the digging operation as it will take weeks to complete the rescue operation because of several complications involved. Also, rescue teams had expressed fears that the vertical wall created at the spot after the digging work would collapse,” Mr Patil said. Forensic expert Ashok Kumar Shetty, who inspected the borewell, said that the boy would have died three to four days ago.
Countless borewells unaccounted-for
- The Rural Development section and the Panchayat Raj Department of the Davangere district has no statistics of the number of borewells which had been dug in the fields by farmers and no record of the number of defunct borewells to be sealed.
- Sources say that in the engineering department of the zilla panchayat, as many as 8,600 borewells have been dug in the district for drinking water. Of these, about 4,000 are working and the remaining borewells have become defunct. However, officials are tight-lipped over the sealing of defunct borewells.
