Karimnagar, Telangana — The well was not deep by local standards. Farmers in Nustulapur had drawn water from it for years without ever imagining it would become the last place a woman fought to stay alive. What makes this story hard to file away as “just another crime report” isn’t the robbery. It’s the twenty-one hours that followed it, hours nobody was supposed to survive.
On the morning of July 1, Gangadhara Lakshmi, 55, did what she had done for years: her son Sandeep dropped her at a labour adda near Tower Circle, one of those informal roadside spots where daily-wage workers stand and wait to be picked for the day’s work. No registration, no ID checks, no record of who takes whom. It’s an economy built entirely on trust between strangers and that trust is exactly what a 21-year-old degree student, Damma Dinesh Reddy, allegedly used against her.
he offered her farm work. She said yes, because saying yes is how she earns her living.
Here’s the detail almost every version of this story rushes past: Reddy allegedly didn’t drive her there on his own bike. He first booked a Rapido ride, a bike-taxi to move her out of the CCTV-heavy stretch near town, then switched her onto his own motorcycle once they were clear of cameras. That’s not the panic of a man improvising a theft. That’s someone routing around evidence before the crime even happens. Police later said the Rapido booking itself became the thread that unravelled him.
At the outskirts of Nustulapur, isolated enough that no one would hear anything, he allegedly took about five grams of gold, twenty grams of silver anklets, and whatever cash she had and pushed her into the well. Investigators say the calculation afterward was cold and specific: she could identify him. So he allegedly returned to the rope she was clinging to, and cut it.
What he didn’t know was that Lakshmi could swim.
It’s an unglamorous, almost accidental fact about her life, something she likely never mentioned to anyone as a skill, just a thing she picked up somewhere along the way and it’s the reason she’s alive today. When the rope gave way, she found a cable running down to a motor pipeline used to draw irrigation water, and held on to it through the night. No one came. Her son had already gone to the police the previous evening, but a missing-person complaint doesn’t move with the urgency a kidnapping would, it took a night in the water for the case to become what it actually was.
She was found the next morning not by a search party, but by a farmer walking to his field who heard her voice. Villagers pulled her out with ropes and a cot, the way people do when there’s no ambulance access to a well in the middle of farmland.
The rest of the case reads almost procedural next to that: police traced the Rapido booking, matched CCTV footage, pulled call records, and arrested Reddy within days. He allegedly confessed to owing nearly ₹4 lakh from online betting apps and gambling platforms, with loan-app agents pressuring him to repay. He’d allegedly already sold the stolen gold to a local jeweller for ₹30,000, a debt trail that, in hindsight, made a woman’s life feel disposable enough to gamble against.
What lingers here isn’t just the cruelty, it’s how ordinary every part of the setup was. A labour adda with no oversight. A bike-taxi booked for convenience. A well that exists on every second farm in this belt, unremarkable until it isn’t. Nothing about this required rare planning; it required a system with no friction anywhere along the way — and one woman’s stubborn will not to let go of a pipe in the dark.
She is recovering now. The accused is in judicial custody. And somewhere between a routine missing-person entry and a rescue by cot and rope, this case quietly became a reminder that survival, sometimes, comes down to one skill nobody thought to ask you if you had.