A four-year-old girl who had gone missing from near her home on the edge of a reserve forest was safely rescued 40 hours later, in a massive search operation led by the Kuppam police and residents of several hamlets.
The girl, a resident of Nakkalagutta village in Kuppam mandal, was rescued from inside the Kangundi reserve forest, which is known to be a habitat of elephants and wild animals.
According to information, Joshika, the daughter of an employee of Dravidian University in Kuppam, was playing with her friends outside her house on Saturday evening. After dusk, her mother went to fetch her but could not find her. A complaint was lodged with the police after a frantic search in and around the village till the early hours of Sunday proved futile.
Nakkalagutta village is surrounded by a reserve forest, which is infested by wild elephants and other wild animals. Worried villagers, along with residents from neighbouring hamlets, joined the search operation of the police from dawn to dusk on Sunday. The police teams scoured the region thoroughly, including searching at open farm wells and water bodies abutting the forest.
A sniffer dog was also deployed into service to search for the missing child. The dog, which sniffed some clothes and footwear of the child, immediately picked up a scent trail and made its way towards the reserve forest. However, it was unable to venture further after losing the scent trail at the edge of the forest.
Suspecting a kidnap angle, Superintendent of Police Y. Rishant Reddy and Circle Inspector (Kuppam) Sridhar alerted all the police stations in Chittoor and neighboring districts, as well as their counterparts in bordering towns of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Against this backdrop, a police party led by Inspector T. Sridhar and Sub-Inspectors C. Umamaheshwar Reddy and Siva Kumar resumed the search for the child in the forests on Monday. Close to noon, the police heard some feeble sounds emanating from the bushes deep inside the forest. Rushing there, the police found the girl lying on the ground with minor bruises. She was immediately rushed to a hospital in Kuppam and was administered first aid, after which she was handed over to her parents.
Kidnap angle
Meanwhile, several questions began to surface after the child’s rescue. How was she able to survive the searing summer heat for prolonged hours and spend two nights in the forest without food or water? With the child showing little signs of fatigue, it is being suspected that someone who might have abducted her must have panicked after seeing the mammoth search operation launched for her, and dumped her in the forest and absconded. Police said that the child is now in a dazed condition, and a clear picture would emerge only after she is a condition to clearly recall and narrate the sequence of events that led to her disappearance.
The parents of the child were overcome with emotion after being reunited with their daughter, and villagers expressed their gratitude to the police for safely rescuing the child.
