An official in India drains the whole dam to get his phone.

In India, a government worker was fired after he asked for a reservoir to be drained so he could get his phone.

After Rajesh Vishwas dropped the device while taking a picture, it took three days to pump millions of liters of water out of the dam.

When the phone was found, it was too full of water to work.

Mr. Vishwas said it needed to be retrieved because it had secret government information on it, but he has been accused of abusing his position.

On Sunday, the food inspector dropped his $1,200 (100,000 rupees) Samsung phone into Kherkatta Dam in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

After local divers couldn’t find it, he paid for a gas pump to be brought in, Mr. Vishwas said in a video statement that was shown in Indian media.

He said that an official had given him direct permission to drain “some water into a nearby canal,” and that the official told him that it would actually help the farmers by giving them more water.

The pump ran for a few days and drained about 2 million liters (440,000 gallons) of water, which is said to be enough to water 600 hectares (6 square kilometers) of fields.

When a report was made, another official from the department of water resources came to stop him.

“He’s been put on hold until an investigation is done. A Kanker district officer, Priyanka Shukla, told The National newspaper that water is an important resource that can’t be wasted in this way.

Mr. Vishwas has said that he didn’t abuse his power and that the water he drained was from the part of the dam where the water overflows and was “not in usable condition.”

But his actions have been criticized by politicians. The national vice-president of the state’s opposition BJP party tweeted: “When people depend on tankers for water in the hot summers, the officer drained 41 lakh litres that could have been used to irrigate 1,500 acres of land.”