On the afternoon of 10 June 2022, in Pihrid village, Janjgir-Champa district, Chhattisgarh, 10-year-old Rahul Sahu—deaf and unable to speak—was playing in the courtyard. His father had recently dug an unused borewell in the hunt for water and left it poorly covered. The lid shifted. Rahul fell.

He stopped about 60 to 80 feet down (roughly 18–24 metres; reports differ) in a shaft little wider than his shoulders. His mother, Geeta, heard cries and ran. By evening the district collector had called the National Disaster Response Force, the State Disaster Response Force, the Army, mining crews, and earth movers. More than 500 people would work the site.

They could not simply haul him up the original hole. Rock slowed every metre. They dug a parallel shaft and then a connecting tunnel. Oxygen and food—bananas, juice, ORS—went down pipes. A camera watched him. Family members shouted encouragement he could not hear. A snake and a frog shared the space; rescuers later lifted both out first. The snake was non-venomous. Scorpions appeared in the spoil.

At 11.56 p.m. on 14 June, after 104 hours, a slim rescue worker on a safety line reached Rahul’s hand. He came out on a stretcher, oxygen mask on, then travelled a green-corridor ambulance to Apollo Hospital in Bilaspur. Officials said he was weak but stable.

India has seen many children die in uncovered borewells. This operation—nicknamed Operation Zindagi / Operation Rahul—was one of the longest successful ones. The Spanish caption’s “30 metres” is a rounded figure; the official range is shallower. The rest is on the record: a hearing-impaired boy, four days underground, a country watching NDRF orange jackets, and a child who walked back into photographs smiling in a red shirt.

Sources

• Hindustan Times, “From a pit in a Chhattisgarh village, story of the boy who lived,” 16 June 2022
• News18 / The Hindu / PTI / Rediff, 14–16 June 2022
• NDRF and Janjgir-Champa Collector Jitendra Shukla briefings
• Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel statements; green corridor to Apollo, Bilaspur