Three-year-old girl's 26-hour ordeal ends

Three-year-old girl Vandana was on Wednesday night rescued 26 hours after she fell into an abandoned borewell in Agra district.

Earlier, cries of "Mummy mummy, pani pani" resonated from the 45-feet deep borewell where the girl lay trapped for nearly after she fell into the pit, as army personnel and rescue workers raced against time to save her.
 
The cries of the hapless Vandana were seen as encouraging signs of life by local authorities, after she slipped into the borewell in Hulaspura village on the Agra-Mumbai highway on Tuesday evening, while playing with her father.
 
A huge pit on a flat ground was dug parallel to the borewell with the help of dredgers to enable rescue personnel to go down and then carve a tunnel in a bid to reach the girl and bring her out.
 
The personnel were constantly talking to the girl to keep her calm. A team of doctors and an ambulance were on standby.
 
Officials said the girl frequently asked for fruits and sweets, which were being sent with the help of a rope. Oxygen was also being pumped inside the borewell through tubes to prevent any suffocation as the girl showed extraordinary resilience in fighting for her survival.
 
Sources said the army was called in, after efforts by the locals to rescue the girl, failed.
 
Officials said the borewell was abandoned after it was dug about a month back under a local MLA scheme. Top police and district administration officials were coordinating the rescue operations.
 
Several cases of children falling into uncovered borewells have been reported from Kurukshetra, Ghaziabad, Ahmedabad, Raichur and Jaipur in the last couple of years.
 
In July 2006, five-year-old Prince captured the imagination of the country when he survived a 50-hour ordeal, after he fell into an open borewell in Kurukshetra in Haryana.