Two judges of the Madras High Court have agreed to a special sitting on Tuesday to hear a petition relating to the death of the 2-year-old Sujith Wilson who was pulled out dead from an abandoned borewell in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirappalli district. Sujith was playing near the open borewell on Friday evening when he slipped in.
Scores of rescue workers worked for more than three days to save him, deploying robotic rescue devices and oil rigs to reach the toddler. He was pulled out at 4 am on Tuesday. The young boy had been dead for quite some time; his body had started to decompose.
Trichy district collector S Sivarasu told reporters that the borewell would be sealed with concrete.
Sujith Wilson is the 12th child to have fallen in an open borewell in Tamil Nadu since 2009. Only four of them could be rescued; the last one was a 2-year-old girl who fell in a shallow borewell in Nagapattinam’s Puduppalli area.
It was in this context that V Ponraj, scientific advisor to former president APJ Abdul Kalam, petitioned the high court to seek its intervention to prevent such deaths of children. Justices M Sathyanarayanan, the high court’s third most-senior judge and N Seshasayee will hear the petition later today.
Sujith Wilson’s death prompted Chief Minister E Palaniswami to order district officials across the state to ensure that the rules for sealing abandoned borewells were strictly followed. Strict action should be taken against those who fail to adhere to the rules, he said.
The 75-hour-long attempt to save Sujith Wilson had made national news as the country and top leaders closely followed the rescue efforts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also spoken to chief minister Palaniswami and asked him to spare no efforts to save the child.
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who had remembered the race against time to save the child on Diwali, has also condoled his death.
Prasanta Patnaik