Madhya Pradesh: India boy, 8, dies after being trapped in well

An eight-year-old boy who was trapped in a well in India for more than three days has died.

Tanmay Sahu fell into the borewell in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh while playing with friends on Tuesday evening.

A rescue operation was launched to free him, with officials saying he was stuck at about 55ft in the 400ft-deep well.

But he was not responding by the time rescuers reached him on Saturday morning, a local police official said.

The official told BBC Hindi: "Local police, fire fighters, home guards and the state disaster response force personnel were struggling ever since the boy fell in the borewell in Mandawi area.

"Early morning around 05:30 the teams managed to reach the boy by digging a parallel hole."

The boy was taken to hospital where doctors declared him as "brought dead". A post-mortem will now be carried out.

For the last four days, rescue workers had been working to dig a tunnel along the borewell.

Oxygen was being pumped to the boy but the layers of mud meant emergency workers could not asses his condition.

Home Guards commandant S. R. Azmi had told reporters that the rescue operations had suffered delays due to rocky layers beneath the surface.

Due to water shortages, several farmers in India set up borewells - deep wells dug into the ground to extract water - for irrigation purposes.

After these wells run dry they are abandoned and left uncovered, posing a serious risk to passers-by, especially children.

Several children have died due to suffocation after falling into narrow borewells in India.