The waste of millions of liters of water to recover a phone from an official has been a scandal in India and a totally useless action.
Rajesh Vishwas, a local food official, dropped his cell phone while taking a selfie at the Kherkatta dam in Chhattisgarh state.
Rather than give up, he sought a way to get his expensive Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra device, worth nearly $1,200, back.
First he sent local divers to look for it, but they were unsuccessful.
So Vishwas paid for a diesel pump to be brought in and to extract the water so he could recover it, the official said in a video quoted in Indian media.
It took three days to pump two million liters of water from the dam.
And when they found it, the phone was too damaged to work.
Your justification
Vishwas claimed that the phone contained sensitive government data and needed to be recovered.
He stated that he had verbal permission from RC Dhivar, a local Water Resources Department official, to release “some water into a nearby canal”.
This, he said, “would actually benefit farmers who would have more water.”
A member of the water resources department arrived at the scene following a complaint.
“Vishwas has been suspended pending an investigation. Water is an essential resource and it cannot be wasted like this,” Priyanka Shukla, a Kanker district official, told the daily. The National.
The water released was enough to irrigate about 600 hectares of farmland.
Vishwas has denied abusing his position, saying the water he drained came from the overflow section of the dam and was “not in a usable condition.”
But his actions have drawn widespread criticism across the country, as India has experienced severe droughts and heat waves in recent years.
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See original article on BBC