From a pit in a Chhattisgarh village, story of the boy who lived

Ritesh Mishra

PIHRID (JANJGIR CHAMPA): It is noon on Wednesday, and the sun is high over the village of Pihrid. Yet, most of its residents are still sleeping, exhausted, but relieved.

The silence is in sharp contrast to events since Friday — 104 hours of frenetic activity to save a life. In one corner of the hamlet is a massive mountain of mud and earth, excavated out of a painstakingly dug hole in the ground. Once in a while, there are visitors, their cameras at the ready, eyes straining to find that one narrow hole in the rubble. A hole that unified Chhattisgarh in prayer for four whole days. A hole, less than a foot in diameter but 60 feet in depth, that saw a nervous, breathless rescue operation by multiple agencies and 500 men, for a full 104 hours. A hole, out of which, at 11.56pm on Tuesday night, to loud applause and flashing cameras, 11-yearold deaf and speech impaired Rahul Sahu miraculously emerged, his eyes bright with life.

At 4pm on Friday afternoon, Geeta Sahu knew something was wrong. Only 15 minutes before, she had seen her son playing with friends outside their home, as she stitched. But now, suddenly, she could hear him crying. By itself, that would not have worried her. Except the sound was faint and muffled, as if it was coming from a great distance. She ran towards her son. Her worst fears had been realised. Somehow, he had fallen into the tiny crevice of an unused borewell, dug by her husband Ram Lal Sahu in the hunt for water.

On most days, the family had been careful, covering the slit with an upturned steel vessel. “But on Friday, God knows how, Rahul fell in,” Ram Lal Sahu, a farmer who owns three small shops in the village, said. As neighbours collected and the family panicked, they peered in. All they could see was darkness, and all they could do was hear him in pain. “A borewell is normally eighty feet deep. We just could not see him,” said Rahul’s grandmother, 70-year-old Shyama Bai Sahu.

By 4.15pm, a call had been placed to the Janjgir Champa Police, the information then relayed to the district administration. By 4.45pm, district collector Jitendra Shukla had placed calls to officials of Public Health Engineering, PWD, electricity board, and mining departments, asking them to urgently assemble at the spot. A call was also made to the home department, asking them to arrange for rescue and relief teams of NDRF, SDRF and the Indian Army. “By 6.15pm, every senior official had reached the spot. We cordoned the area off, and started digging a pit a few feet away from the borewell,” said Vijay Agarwal, superintendent of police, Janjgir Champa.

The initial prognosis was not encouraging. The ground was extremely rocky and rescue was not going to be easy, PHE officials told the district magistrate. “We dropped a camera and a sensor inside the hole, and the first thing we spotted at 60 feet was a pool of water, with no sign of the boy. Just after that, we saw a glimpse of him, which told us that there was a cavity inside the well, where he had the sense to take shelter,” Shukla said.

Except, Sahu was not alone. The camera picked up two other signs of life in the deep crevice. A frog, and worryingly, a snake that they did not know then was not venomous. “The thought of a small deaf and mute child, 60 feet under the ground, in the company of a snake filled me with dread. My hopes were not high, but the operation was being monitored by the chief minister himself, so I told him about the boy, and the snake,” Shukla said.

By Friday night, the rescue team had grown to around 500, with officials of NDRF and the Indian Army taking the lead. There were 50 machines engaged in excavation including tractors, excavators, and electric drills, even as rows and rows of trucks shifted the excavated earth. The idea was to dig a hole next to the borewell, and then drill a tunnel to reach Sahu. The work was slow and arduous, and a misstep potentially meant death. But with a few dozen children in India falling into bore wells every year, this is the technique that has proved the most successful.

One key to the operation was to ensure Rahul had access to oxygen, dropped down through the borewell using two pipes, at the end of which were attached a 50 litre oxygen cylinder. The other was that he had to keep eating, with six bananas, three boxes of juice, and two packets of ORS solution send down through a makeshift pulley over the four days.

There was another crisis. At 12pm on Monday, rescuers realised that the water level was rising in the pit. “I immediately ordered that all functional borewells in the village be turned on to bring this level down. NDRF personnel drained out water using a vessel tied to a rope, and we even released water from two stop dams in the area. At this point, the camera footage showed that the boy was unresponsive, and the snake was actually crawling across him,” district magistrate Shukla said.

By Monday night, rescuers were hopeful they would reach Rahul quickly, the sedimentary rocks easy to cut through. But at 6pm on Monday, rescuers hit a lode of dolomite, a rock that is difficult to drill through. “Though we had excavated 57 feet parallel to the borewell, and were trying to drill a tunnel horizontally towards him, we came across dolomite. These stones are harder than marble, and usually are blasted apart and not drilled. In this case, that was obviously not an option,” said Vardhman Mishra, who led the NDRF team in the rescue operation.

Every step towards Rahul was now hard-earned. “It took two hours to drill through one foot of dolomite,” Mishra said.

At 6.30pm on Tuesday evening, the team broke through. Camera monitors following the teams drilling the parallel tunnel were suddenly filled with a bright light emanating from an opening. They had reached Rahul Sahu’s borewell, the tiny crevice he had called home for four days. Rescuers first extricated the frog and the snake, later found to be nonvenomous using a bucket, but Rahul was still six feet away, and unresponsive.

It took another four hours to drill a hole big enough for a man to enter, and eventually, a lithe rescue worker, safety belt tied across his waist, touched Rahul’s hand.

As the state watched on TV, as the chief minister watched and live tweeted, and as an entire village cheered, at just before midnight on Tuesday night, Rahul Sahu emerged, his eyes open. He was rushed in an ambulance to the Apollo Hospital in Bilaspur, 50km away. On Wednesday morning, a statement from the hospital said that all Rahul had was sepsis from a bacterial infection, and a slight fever, and would undergo treatment for seven days.

On Wednesday the village of Pihrid finally slept, confident that their own will come home soon.

Ram Lal Sahu said, “My son may be deaf and mute, but today, he has proved he is stronger than any normal child I know.”

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