By Tim Binnall
Following a botched selfie wherein he accidentally dropped his phone into a reservoir, a government official in India went to drastic measures to retrieve the device by draining the site of its water. The bizarre incident reportedly occurred last week when food inspector Rajesh Vishwas was visiting the Kherkatta Dam in the city of Pakhanjur. After a picnic at a reservoir which contains overflow water from the dam, he attempted to take a picture of himself to commemorate the day, but wound up fumbling his phone, which plummeted down into the lake. What followed next was an ill-advised 'rescue mission' that has made Vishwas the scourge of social media in India and quite possibly cost him his job.
Asserting that the device contained critical government information, he first enlisted divers to search for it, but their efforts proved to be futile after a few days. Undeterred, he then received permission from a local official to drain the reservoir with a rented pump so that he could find the lost phone. Over the course of the next two days, the machine removed what is believed to be a staggering 440,000 gallons of water from the site. Another local official eventually put a stop to the operation and Vishwas was suspended from his job for what has been characterized as a misuse of his position.
Word of the weird endeavor quickly spread like wildfire online in India with many lambasting Vishwas for his wastefulness. However, for his part, the food inspector groused that the media has overstated how much water was actually removed from the reservoir and insisted that the overflow "is used only for bathing by those who come here for a picnic and not for irrigation or other purposes." As for the missing phone, Vishwas did eventually recover the device, but by then it had been rendered unusable after being submerged for several days.