Vandana

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Vandana Singh became famous all over the world at 27 months of age when she fell in a 180 ft. deep dry borewell in the Taj Mahal town of Agra on 25 March 2008, to be rescued by a team of 40 soldiers of the Indian Army's Engineering Corps after 28 hours of intense struggle against shifting mud and oxygen deprivation in the deep trench dug beside the borewell to reach the stuck girl through a horizontal tunnel.

Vandana had been playing with her elder sister outside their house in the Saiyyan town of Agra district on 25 March, 2008 at 6 pm IST, when she accidentally stepped on the jute-bags covering a failed borewell dug about a month back. Being 10-inches in diameter, the hole was wide enough for the girl to slide inside, shrieking in terror as her parents rushed out to save her only to find her trapped 45 feet down in the bore well, luckily saved from sliding further down by the jute-bags that crammed up in the hole under her.

The villagers immediately began digging a pit besides the borewell but soon realized that it was beyond their capabilities, rushing to the local police station at about 10 pm IST. The area police immediately relayed this information to the Agra district magistrate Mukesh Meshram who, in turn, called Brigadier Shyam Srivastava heading the EME Corps in Agra. The Corps Engineers under Lt. Col. Rajeev Kaul and Capt Unnikrishnan were also called in and they guided the mission thereon. As the situation became precarious with time the Army Paratrooper Engineers took on the execution of the task especially the horizontal tunnel digging which was difficult, dangerous and most critical phase of the operation. Lt. Col. Kaul guided the mission to its success. The task with the efforts could not be hastened as the sand in the area was loose and there was danger of the sand filling up the pit, which could be fatal for the girl.

Throughout the ordeal, the girl was being fed tea, biscuits and milk to help her survive the claustrophobic surroundings in the bore well, while oxygen was pumped through tubes. At 10 am the following morning, Vandana finally showed some signs of revival and asked to eat some boiled potato which was promptly lowered into the hole along with a mobile phone which was used to acquire an audio signal by the soldiers to zero in on the girl's exact location in the borewell.

Tension mounted as the parallel pit being dug by the soldiers reached the required depth and the Army engineers started to dig a 2 meter long horizontal tunnel to reach the girl. Work on the tunnel progressed painfully slow as the soldiers worked continually to strengthen the tunnel by cutting out the lids of empty kerosene drums and sliding them inside the tunnel before digging further.

Eventually, at 9:30 pm on Wednesday, the light from a soldier's torch shone inside the bore well, lighting up the frightened face of the girl trapped inside the borewell. The frightened girl was carefully pulled into the parallel pit through the tunnel and raised to the surface, where she was immediately taken to the ambulance to undergo a battery of health checks before she was declared physically uninjured, though she was taken to the hospital for rest and recuperation.

News Media from across the world reported this incident as television viewers remained glued to their screens to watch this rescue operation concluded successfully by the brave soldiers of the Indian Army.