Newborn Baby Rescued by Villagers After Being Buried Alive in Mud, Survives Against the Odds

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A newborn baby boy survives after being buried alive beneath the mud in a village in India. Laborers building a house nearby heard the baby’s cries, and the infant was rescued by members of the village.

According to the Mirror, the baby boy was located and rescued by locals from Sonoura Village of Sidharthnagar District in Uttar Pradesh, a state in the northern part of India, on May 25, 2020. The baby was found after the impromptu search team spotted one of his tiny legs poking out of the mud.

Video footage shared by the Daily Mail depicts a villager gently trying to locate the baby’s arms under the mud and dust by digging with his hands. After locating the arms, the rescuer then lifts the baby’s tiny body from out of the ground and watches for signs of life.

Initially, the baby is motionless, but within seconds he begins to move his limbs. The baby’s rescuer blows gently on his face to remove the covering of dust and to assist the newborn in catching his breath.

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After carefully retrieving the baby boy from the mud, villagers rushed him to the local Community Health Centre (CHC), according to the Times of India, from where he was shortly transferred to the district hospital. Miraculously, he survived.

Doctors ascertained that the baby had a blocked respiratory tract caused by swallowing mud but described his condition as “stable.”

At the time of writing, the newborn remains under doctors’ supervision, but his future looks brighter than his unfortunate past, as a Sonoura Village resident named Laxmi has come forward with an offer to adopt the baby boy, according to the Mirror.

However, neither the villagers nor the authorities have discovered why, and by whom, the newborn was buried alive. A case has been filed against a person in Sidharthnagar District. The person remains unidentified to the news media, and the investigation is ongoing.

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Months prior, a 4-day-old premature baby girl made headlines after she was found buried alive in a cemetery in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

According to CNN, the infant was discovered by a couple on Oct. 10, 2019, who were visiting the cemetery to bury their own baby after she was stillborn. “When they began digging the ground, they immediately heard noises of crying,” Superintendent of Police for Bareilly District, Abhinandan Singh, explained.

“As they dug up two to three feet of dirt, they found a baby girl who had been buried in an earthen pot,” Singh continued. Police soon arrived on the scene and escorted the baby girl to a hospital.

The infant was allegedly buried in an isolated area of the cemetery. Singh believed that she had been underground for between four and six hours before she was rescued.

On Dec. 5, 2019, almost two months since the baby girl’s rescue, BBC News reported that the baby had weighed a mere 2.4 pounds (approx 1.1 kg) upon arrival at the hospital and was suffering from hypothermia, septicemia, and low blood sugar.

However, the infant’s primary doctor, pediatrician Ravi Khanna, reported that the little girl started to accept bottle feed, gained vital weight, and began to overcome her health problems. She was then taken into the custody of child welfare authorities in Bareilly District, who planned to put her up for adoption as her birth parents had not come forward.

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Bareilly District authorities believed that the baby’s parents were complicit in her burial but did not speculate on their motives.