Thursday 26 June 2014

OPEN BORE WELLS ACT AS GRAVES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN

 24 kids died in four years in Tamil Nadu after falling into open borewells 

Chennai, June 26: Over 20 children in Tamil Nadu have lost their lives as they stepped into bore wells and died during the rescue operation since 2010. Due to the negligence of the farm owners and conventional rescue mechanism by the fire and rescue services officials took the lives of little children, say child rights activists, who released a fact finding report on deaths of children in open bore wells and wells in Tamil Nadu, in Chennai on Wednesday.
Releasing the report Thomas Jayaraj, director of Centre for child rights and development said, “More than 500 children in India including 24 children in Tamil Nadu have died in the last four years struggling to survive in the abandoned borewell and wells. On an average the rescue process takes 9 to 45 hours to dig the child out of bore well and very rarely children are saved.”  He added that Supreme Court guidelines on safety measures related to open borewell are not implemented. “The National and state child rights commission officials have not taken any serious measures to address this issue,” he said.
R.Jone (20) and S.Shine (17), both engineering students, who were part of the fact finding team said that government officials blamed the model code of conduct by the election commission for not circulating the supreme court guidelines on open bore wells. “We were quit upset that even after so many deaths, officials are not informed about the problem and they blamed the election commission for not carrying out their job. 

In one case, a three-year-old child Harshan fell into bore well in Kuthalaperi village in Tirunelveli and he was rescued. But even after ten days, the bore well and the deep pit dug to bring him out were not closed,” said Jone and Shine, representatives of children’s movement for climate justice.


The voluntary organisations have asked the government to introduce modernized rescue methods and take preventive steps to avoid deaths of children in bore wells in future. They also demanded immediate disbursal of compensation for parents who had lost their children instead of making them wait for years to receive the money. 

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