A five-year-old boy who was chasing a ball fell into a pond next to a playground in Jyoti Nagar, on the outskirts of New Town, and drowned on Saturday, police said.

Ayush Mondal was kicking around a small ball a little distance away from other children in the playground near a club called Milan Sangha, an officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said. The pond is next to the ground and Ayush’s ball fell into it, he said.

The boy went into the pond, which has a sloping bank, to try and grab the ball when he started drowning, another officer said. “The other children were a distance away and nobody saw him walking into the water. He did not know how to swim,” the officer said.

Residents and passers-by saw Ayush floating face down in the pond and pulled him out. They alerted his parents and the police.

Neighbours and members of the club took him to the sub-divisional hospital in Salt Lake, 6.1km away, where he was declared dead.

“The boy had lost consciousness when he was brought in. We could not revive him,” a doctor who examined him said.

Ayush was extremely playful and used to be seen in the playground whenever his parents let him out, neighbour Parimal Majhi said.

“Like all children his age, he used to love playing outdoors. His family is inconsonable,” said Majhi.

The pond where Ayush drowned is around 5ft-deep and like many water bodies that dot the city, it does not have a guard wall or parapet around it. The banks are slippery because of algae and moss.