A rescue operation of at least nine hours to save a five-year-old boy who fell into a borewell in a village in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district proved futile as he was pulled out dead in the wee hours of Tuesday, officials said. The deceased, Sagar Barela, was the son of a sugarcane worker who hailed from Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh.

The child fell into the borewell in Kopardi village under Karjat tehsil, around 125 km from Pune city, at around 5 PM on Monday, shortly after he got down from a bullock cart, a police official said.

Personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), along with local police and district administration personnel, launched an operation to rescue him.

"The boy was pulled out dead from the borewell at around 2 AM on Tuesday," a police official said.

Officials had said the boy was trapped at a depth of 15 feet in the defunct borewell.

Karjat-Jamkhed MLA Rohit Pawar said farmers should take care to properly cover borewells in their fields.

"The incident of the death of a labourer's child after falling into a borewell in my constituency is very unfortunate. He could not be saved despite best efforts. But to avoid such incidents, farmers should take care to properly cover the bore wells in their fields," Pawar tweeted.

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