Correspondent, NewsCrunch
In a breath-taking rescue effort, a brave youngster pulled out a lamb from an abandoned borewell risking his own life.
A local TV channel TV 9 reported that the incident occurred at a village near South Indian city of Vijayapura.
The man and his friends spotted an abandoned borewell and heard a lamb bleating from inside. The poor animal had fallen inside the borewell, which had been left uncovered, after it had failed to yield water.
They could see that the animal had got struck at a shallow depth.
A video of the incident shows them discussing in Kannada language that someone would have to be lowered inside the borewell upside down to pull the lamb out.
The know that the manoeuvre is extremely risky as the man would plunge to a suffocating death if the people holding his legs lose grip.
The first volunteer backs off saying it would be hard to breath inside.
A second volunteer steps in saying he is willing to go inside if his friends can hold on to his feet. After they assure, he is lowered inside, hands first.
They find that the lamb is stuck deeper than they thought.
In the heart-stopping moments that follow, the man risks disappearing into the borewell with two friends hanging on to his feet.
But the effort pays off and the man finally tells his friends to pull him up. He surfaces clutching on to the lucky lamb by its ears.
Reports of children falling into uncovered borewells surface periodically from all over India. Farmers, who dig these wells abandon them when they fail to yield water, unwilling to incur the additional expense of covering them up.
Many of these wells – literal death traps – are strewn across the country waiting for a young victim to step into them.