Government official orders emptying a whole dam after dropping his Samsung Galaxy in it

One Rajesh Vishwas, a food inspector from the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, managed to plop his expensive Samsung handset, which, judging from the price, could very well have been a Galaxy S23 Ultra, into the Kherkatta Dam.

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Granted, he asked for the help of local divers first, but they failed to find the phone on the bottom of the artificial lake. Armed with authority as a food safety inspector, he asked another official if he can pump out some water, using the permission to order that the whole dam be emptied so that he can retrieve his phone. While the other local government official verbally agreed to send "some water into a nearby canal" with the argument that farmers would then have more of it for irrigation, the diesel pumps ran for several days.

They drained hundreds of thousands of gallons from the dam, enough to irrigate 600 hectares of arable land in the process. After receiving a complaint that the food inspector is bent on emptying out the whole amount of water, the local water resource department sprang into action and acted to stop the pumping.

Mr. Vishwas claims that the water drained was from the overflow section of the Kherkatta Dam and not really usable, but he still got suspended pending a further inquiry, as a local government representative commented that "water is an essential resource and it cannot be wasted like this."

As for the Samsung Galaxy phone that started it all, it was actually found at the bottom of the artificial lake at one point in the draining spree, but was too damaged to work properly, so the whole enterprise seems to have been in vain. 

How did the Indian food inspector drop the phone into the dam? Why, taking a picture of himself with the front camera, of course, though at least that wasn't one of those harrowing death-by-selfie incidents that have led to many a careless amateur photographer to fall from cliffs and even drown.