Rescue efforts continued for the third day to save the toddler who fell into an abandoned borewell in a village in Tamil Nadu's Tiruchirappalli district.
With different methods of rescue failing for 36 hours, the fire and rescue officials deployed a heavy drilling machine on Sunday morning to dig a secondary hole just 6 feet away. However, it remains to be a difficulty due to the hard nature of the soil.
Health Minister, C Vijayabaskar, said, "The rocky nature of the soil has been causing us extreme difficulty. Even the heavy drills are not able to penetrate the land".
With the soil proving difficulty, the officials then brought in a more powerful driller from Ramanathapuram belonging to L&T.
The health minister added, "The new machine arrived at the spot around 5 pm. They are currently fixing the machine, it will be deployed into action by 8 pm".
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Reportedly, the machine has the capability to drill three times faster than the machine deployed on Sunday morning.
The toddler fell into a 600-feet borewell in front of his house on Friday night while playing with cousins. While Sujith was initially spotted at a depth of 27-feet, he later sunk as low as 100-feet.
J Radhakrishnan, Revenue, Principal Secretary, said, "The new machine can work three times faster than the one deployed currently. Once the drilling is done, we will start the horizontal drilling immediately".
According to the plans of the rescue officials, first, a borewell ten feet deeper than the one in which Sujith is stuck will be drilled. Then horizontal drilling for 6 feet, would leave the rescue personnel right below the spot of Sujith. The entire operation will include 10-12 fire and rescue officials chosen from the central districts.