Chandigarh, June 04: A one- and- half- year- old girl, who had fallen into a 200- feet borewell in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, died on Thursday, despite the army’s 20- hour operation to save her.
The girl, identified as Dilrajpreet Kaur, was playing in the courtyard of her uncle’s house in Dhira village on Wednesday afternoon when she slipped into the well.
The local police tried to pull her out but had to call the army when their attempts failed.
A police officer said the child had fallen 29 feet inside. The police were able to supply oxygen to her and had inserted a camera in the borewell to keep a watch on her activities and health.
The army pulled out Dilrajpreet around 1.30 pm on Thursday but she died before she could reach a hospital.
Mahender Singh, senior medical officer at Batala Civil Hospital, said: “ She appeared to have died because of suffocation.” In a similar incident in 2006, a five- year- old boy, Prince, had survived after being pulled out from a 53- feet- deep shaft in Shahbad, Haryana. The rescue operation had taken two days.
—Agencies