9-Year-Old Boy Rescued After Falling into 45-Foot Borewell in Rajasthan's Alwar

A nine-year-old boy was successfully rescued after falling into a 45-foot open borewell while chasing a kite in the Butoli village of Rajasthan's Alwar district on Monday night. The joint operation spanned nearly five hours before emergency responders pulled the child out safely.

Local residents first noticed the incident after the boy stepped on a stone covering the opening, causing him to fall into the shaft. Bystanders attempted an initial rescue before alerting local police and the district administration. Rescuers pulled the boy from the pit around 11:30 p.m. and immediately transferred him to Alwar District Hospital, where doctors reported he was in good health.

Alwar Additional Police Superintendent Priyanka Raghuvanshi confirmed that a team from the National Disaster Response Force was deployed to Butoli to lead the extraction alongside local specialists. Raghuvanshi noted that the rescue team proceeded cautiously to reach the child and pull him out safely. Sukhwant Singh, the local assembly member, also arrived at the site to review the operation.

The incident in Alwar underscores persistent safety concerns surrounding uncovered borewells in India. Data presented by the Union Home Ministry to Parliament in July revealed that the National Disaster Response Force carried out 37 borewell rescue operations across India between 2020 and 2025. Only 17 of those missions succeeded in saving the victim.

An NDRF report titled Borewell Rescue Precis noted that more than 40 children fell into open borewells nationwide between 2009 and 2017, with 92 percent of the victims aged under 10. India has approximately 27 million borewells dug to combat water scarcity and declining underground aquifers. Many dry or low-yielding shafts are left abandoned without protective coverings, creating dangerous hazards in rural and semi-urban areas.

Unsecured shafts have resulted in multiple tragedies in recent years. In July, a four-year-old child died after falling into a 220-foot borewell in Ambala, Haryana, following a 21-hour rescue attempt. In 2006, the high-profile rescue of five-year-old Prince Kumar from a 60-foot pit in Kurukshetra prompted the Supreme Court of India to issue binding guidelines in 2010, mandating that all abandoned borewells be capped or filled with sand and clay.

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