Eight villagers die after inhaling toxic gas inside well in MP's Khandwa district

Khandwa: Eight persons died inside a well possibly due to the inhalation of a toxic gas that emanated from the water body in a village in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh on Thursday, senior officials said.

The incident took place at Kondavat village in the Chaigaon Makhan area at around 4 pm when a group of persons entered the well (bawdi) to clean it for immersions on the occasion of Gangour Mata festival and got trapped inside, Khandwa Collector Rishav Gupta and SP Manoj Kumar Rai told reporters.

Initially, five persons entered the well, but when they got trapped, three more villagers went inside the water body to help them. However, all of them died possibly due to the inhalation of a poisonous gas emanating from the well, they said.

State Disaster Emergency Response Force (SDERF) personnel, local policemen and villagers initially launched a rescue operation lasting nearly four hours to save the men. Later, they fished out the bodies and sent them to hospital for post-mortem, Gupta said.

Initial reports suggested the well remained largely unused round the year and was cleaned for the purpose of immersions during the annual Gangaour Mata festival. As the water body was not in use for a long time, toxic gases had formed inside it, maintained the collector.

The district administration has announced an ex-gratia of Rs 4 lakh each to the kin of the deceased, he said.

The deceased were identified as Mohan (55), Anil Patel (30), Sharan Sukhram (30), Arjun (35), Gajanand, (25), Baliram (36), Rakesh (22) and Ajay (25), an official said.