Agra girl trapped in borewell rescued

TIMELY RESCUE: Vandana is now sleeping in the ICU with her parents by her side.

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Suhasini Haidar

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Agra (Uttar Pradesh): For more than a day the entire nation prayed for her, as Vandana survived after being trapped for nearly 27 hours inside a narrow borewell.

She is dehydrated and so exhausted that she can barely open her eyes.

Vandana will be kept under observation in an Agra hospital for 48 hours.

“What kept her alive was sheer willpower. She kept talking to the rescuers despite being in a dark, tiny hole,” says Principal, SN medical hospital, Dr N C Prajapati.

Vandana's ordeal began on Tuesday evening when she stumbled into a borewell, only one-and-a-half feet wide.

As Vandana's cries reached them from 45 feet below the ground, the army and local authorities began a massive operation to get her out alive.

They kept her going on glucose and oxygen fed through tubes while cranes dug a bore parallel to where she was stuck.

Then one rescuer crawled through, painstakingly tunneling sideways to connect the larger pit to the well.

“She was buried under some mud. I spotted her head. I then cleared away the debris and pulled her out,” says first rescuer to reach Vandana, Capt Singh.

Minutes later, Vandana was carried out, unconscious but alive. And that was reward enough for the men who toiled tirelessly to save her, and relief for the thousands who prayed for her rescue.

“At one point we thought that it would be very difficult to rescue her,” says Vandana's father, Bengali Babu.

The bold rescue effort was aided by lessons learned from the past.

The armymen who planned the operation relied on the report prepared after the rescue of five-year-old Prince, who fell into a well in Haryana last year.

Vandana is now sleeping in the ICU with her parents by her side, even as the family returns to life that had been derailed for the past 24 hours.