Doctors who saved a premature newborn baby after being brought in to the hospital is fully recovering.
The newborn baby girl found buried alive in a clay pot in northern India was in a critical condition, suffering from septicaemia and a dangerously low platelet count in mid-October.
She has now gained weight and breathing, and platelet counts are normal, her paediatrician Ravi Khanna told the BBC.
Her parents are unknown, and she will be put up for adoption after a mandatory wait period.
Currently, she is in the custody of child welfare authorities in Bareilly district, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
The baby girl was accidentally found by a villager who was burying his own daughter, who was stillborn. Hindus generally cremate their dead, but babies and young children are often buried.
The villager said he had dug about 90cm (3ft) below the surface when his shovel hit the earthen pot which broke, and he heard a baby crying. When he pulled out the pot, he found a baby in it.
Doctors said she was a premature baby, possibly born at 30 weeks, and weighed a mere 1.1kg (2.4lb) when she was brought in. She appeared visibly shrivelled, was hypothermic and had hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar).
“On Tuesday, when we handed her over to the district hospital authorities, she weighed 2.57kg [5.66lb]. She’s accepting bottle feed and she is now totally healthy,” Dr Khanna said on Thursday.
Dr Khanna said she might have been buried as long as “three to four days, surviving on her brown fat”. Babies are born with fat on their abdomen, thigh and cheek and they can survive on it in an emergency for some time.
But other experts give a more conservative estimate – they say she could have been only buried for “two to three hours” and might have survived for “another hour or two” if she hadn’t been rescued.
In October, police lodged a criminal case against “unknown persons” and began looking for the newborn’s parents.
They said they believed her parents were complicit in her burial, because even after the case was widely publicised, no-one came forward to claim her.
India’s gender ratio is one of the worst in the world. Women are often discriminated against socially and girls are seen as a financial burden, especially among poor communities.
