Kerala: Body of sanitation worker found in canal after 46 hours of rescue operation

The sanitation worker was swept away while cleaning Amayizhanchan Canal which runs through Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala's capital on Saturday.

The body of a sanitation worker who had gone missing while cleaning a canal in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram, was found by the rescue team on Monday morning after 46 hours of search operations. The body of the deceased has been shifted to Thiruvananthapuram Medical College.

Joy's body was located around a kilometre away from the spot he went missing, from a canal stretch behind Sree Chitra Home at Thakarapparambu in Thiruvananthapuram(PTI Photo)

Joy's body was located around a kilometre away from the spot he went missing, from a canal stretch behind Sree Chitra Home at Thakarapparambu reported The New Indian Express reported. The heavy rainfall in the city swept the body away.

Joy, 47 was a contractual labourer who set out to clean parts of the Amayizhanchan Canal which runs through the state capital on Saturday with two others, news agency PTI reported. The deceased had gone missing on Saturday while cleaning the canal tunnel near the Thampanoor Central Railway Station.

The two other workers Rajeev and Manoj confirmed that the body was of Joy, news agency ANI reported. "Today at 9:30 am, we also went to search and were among the first to find the body. The dead body was found between Uppalamoodu and Thakarapparambu," one of the workers told ANI.

On Monday, a team from the Indian Navy joined the rescue operations after their arrival on Sunday night, reported Asianet News.

On Sunday, the rescue team with the fire force, their scuba team, police, civic workers and the National Disaster Response Force were working on rescuing Joy. Bandicoot robots, developed by tech startup Gen Robotics for the Kerala Water Authority, were used by scuba divers to locate the body but were unable to do so due to the lack of light inside the tunnel.

The rescue operations were made difficult by the accumulation of waste in the canal. The scuba divers found it difficult to move forward with their search due to huge bundles of garbage in sacks, polythenes and bags stuck in the canal, Scuba driver Vojin M, part of the Thiruvananthapuram unit told ANI.

Joy, who bagged the contract to clean the canal from the Railways for a sum of ₹1500, is survived by his mother Melhi, reported OnManorama.

(with inputs from news agencies)