National Bravery Awards: 2 Karnataka kids among 22 winners

They would not only receive a medal, certificate and cash but financial assistance would be provided to them till they complete schooling as well as subsequent education up to the graduation level

Two Karnataka kids including 11-year-old Venkatesh, who guided an ambulance carrying a dead body and four individuals on a submerged stretch of road during last year's floods, are among the 22 winners of this year's national bravery awards.

The second Karnataka recipient is nine-years-old Aarti Kiran Shet, who saved her two-year-old brother from a raging cow that gored her before being chased away.

Ten girls and 12 boys have been selected for the Indian Council of Child Welfare's national bravery awards, 2019 which would be handed over to them before the Republic Day.

Since last year, the Narendra Modi government discontinued the 62-year old practice of showcasing the young lion-hearts during the parade.

Last year when floods wreaked havoc in Karnataka, Venkatesh whose village is on the banks of Krishna saw an ambulance struck on a waterlogged bridge near his village. The driver who was on transit from Jagatkal to Yadgiri could not find the road because of the flood water that engulfed everything around submerging the road.

Noticing the helplessness of the driver, the boy jumped into the water ignoring the warnings of getting swept away by the flood and waded through it to reach the spot. He asked the driver to follow him as he knew where the road was and guided the vehicle to safety.

Aarti too showed courage and presence of mind when a raging cow attacked her brother on a tricycle and tried to pierce him with its horn at her home in Uttara Kannada district. Within no time, she picked up her brother and ran towards a corner of her house.

She stood between the kid and the animal that gored her. On hearing her scream, her parents came rushing and saved her.

The coveted award would be conferred upon 15 year old Kerala boy Adithya K, who saved more than forty lives when a tourist bus they were travelling in Nepal, caught fire.

As fire and smoke began to spread inside the bus, the driver escaped. As passengers were trapped inside the bus, Adithya broke the rear glass window of the bus creating an escape route. Within minutes of all the 42 passengers coming out of the bus, its diesel engine exploded turning the whole bus into a fireball.

Besides these three brave children, 19 other kids from Kerala, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram have also been selected for the bravery award.