Six days after 11-year-old Yashwant Achari is suspected to have drowned in a storm water drain in Marathahalli, the police and fire and emergency services have still not been able to trace his body.
Yashwant Achari has been missing since Saturday afternoon. Search operations began only four day after he went missing. The Class 8 student of Sanjaynagar Government School returned home on Saturday afternoon and after lunch informed his mother Ratnamma that he was going out to play cricket with his friends. When he did not come home by late evening, his parents approached the police for help and registered a case.
On Monday, the boy’s father Ramanjaneya Achari, went around with his son's photo, asking shopkeepers if they had seen the boy. A boy at a nearby shop said he had seen Yashwant and five others heading towards the drain on Saturday. The police were informed of this and only then questioned the other boys on Tuesday. The boys confessed that Yashwant had drowned immediately after they entered the water.
The police theorise, on no evidence except the lack of a body, that Yashwant could have survived and “escaped”. "So far we are not able to trace the body of the boy. We suspect that the boy must have escaped from the storm water. The drain is not that deep that we cannot fish out his body even six days after the incident. Probably he got scared that his parents would scold him for going out for a swim and must have run away. However, till we get some clue, we will continue with the search operation," said the investigating officer of the HAL police station.
Achari told Deccan Chronicle, “Even though we registered a complaint with the police on Saturday evening, the police turned a deaf ear till Wednesday morning. It was only after we got clues that our son may have drowned and told the police, that they came forward to help”, he said.