More than eighty hours of rigorous efforts to save Sujith Wilson, the unfortunate two-year old child who accidentally fell into an abandoned borewell in Tamil Nadu's Tiruchirappalli district ultimately proved to be futile.There will now be serious discussions and scores of articles and expert comments saturating the op-ed pages of newspapers. What needs to be done to prevent such future mishaps, who must be held responsible and punished and the so on chorus will continue hardly for a week from now and will die down thereafter. It will be placid all over until a similar ‘accident’ takes place with similar sort of uproar, subsequently followed by ‘forgetfulness’. Falling into borewells is nothing new in the country and it seems that serious rectification processes will never be ever initiated. Had it been so, the kid wouldn’t have lost his life and it can’t also be guaranteed either that this will be the last incident of its kind. 

The first query is why will there be such ‘death traps’ at all in large numbers and what’s the reason for this continuing apathy on part of the concerned civic administration. Again, if this is not the first instance, why the rescue mechanism to address exigencies of these kinds hasn’t been made desirably effective. There will be no answers. But that what will be conspicuously visible is the unending game of ‘passing the buck’ from one layer of administration to another. In TN itself, at least 10 children had died due to these human negligence during past 15 years. There will also be no dearth of such incidents which took away lives of scores of children across the length and breadth of the country. The 2006 rescue operation that managed to save the then five-year-old Prince, who had fallen into a 55-feet deep borewell in a village in Kurukshetra must be still fresh in memory. But that was a miracle and the rest were not that fortunate to return to their parent’s laps.

And the irony is that these ‘death traps’ continue to exist despite clear-cut guidelines from the Supreme Court where safety instructions dealing with the dos and don’ts have been specifically enumerated that are to be adhered by all states. But who cares. Madras High Court while commenting on Sujith’s case has slammed the TN government for ‘waiting for an unfortunate incident to happen’ to initiate steps, besides coming down heavily on media for not acting responsibly by broadcasting and disseminating information to create mass awareness about the perils of abandoned and open borewells.

These are bitter truths. But it’s a country where irresponsible acts get repeated, compelling anyone to utter in disgust- “It happens only in India.”