Holding Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh responsible for “tardy and unprofessional” rescue operation to save two-year-old Fatehveer, SAD president Sukhbir Badal on Monday said that the results would have been very different if the Chief Minister had acted speedily and called in experts to come out to the aid of the young boy and the aggrieved family.
“The young toddler and his family have been failed by the Chief Minister who do not give any express orders for a special operation to rescue Fatehveer and instead left it to the district administration and volunteers to rescue the young boy,” he said.
Sukhbir said: “My heart goes out to the affected family which has been failed by the Congress government, and failed to carry out a professional rescue operation backed by experts which resulted in loss of precious time. This endangered Fatehveer’s life and filled us all with anguish and despair.”
SAD president said that the Chief Minister did not respond to the tragedy for more than two days. “If the CM had taken interest in the beginning itself, a team of the State civil engineering department could have been deputed on the spot immediately,” he said.
He said that it had become clear on the second day itself that the NDRF team deputed at the spot was not equipped to handle the situation and that it did not have the desired engineering expertise to coordinate digging and linking of parallel pipes to take out Fatehveer from the borewell.
“This is the reason why nearly one day was wasted due to wrong placement of rescue pipes, excess digging of the second tunnel and even wrong alignment of horizontal pipe which was to connect the rescue pipe with the borewell pipe in which Fatehveer is stuck,” he said.
Sukhbir said that the state civil engineering officials and army engineers should have been called immediately. “Using local workers, who do not have professional knowledge, delayed the rescue operation unnecessarily,” he said while stressing that the State Government should have sourced high tech machinery needed for a speedy rescue instead of resorting to manual digging which had cost precious time.