Uttarakhand: Drones in rescue act

On Monday, 50 sorties by these UAVs helped rescuers spot people stranded in forests, hills and other isolated areas far away from Badrinath and Kedarnath, which have borne the brunt of flash floods and landslides that hit the state on June 15-16. Chetan Chauhan reports. Drones as saviours

Updated on: Jun 25, 2013, 12:05:41 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Drones, which have earned notoriety for “raining death” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, turned life-savers in flood-ravaged Uttarakhand.

On Monday, 50 sorties by these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) helped rescuers spot people stranded in forests, hills and other isolated areas far away from Badrinath and Kedarnath, which have borne the brunt of flash floods and landslides that hit the state on June 15-16.

Paratroopers were dropped with food and water after the UAVs sent images of people stuck on hilltops.

The images also gave a clear picture of the extent of damage as the drones swept the locations where relief helicopters could not have gone.

"UAVs were deployed to screen the whole area of Kedarnath axis to rule out the presence of survivors in the inaccessible places," said a government statement.

The four Netra (eyes in Hindi) UAVs, each weighing 1.5 kg, not only helped rescuers locate survivors but also bodies scattered far away from the epicentre of the disaster.

"The real-time information provided by the UAVs relayed on laptops in the control rooms helped in tracing down stranded people and for coordination of rescue," said MS Reddy, vice-chairperson of National Disaster Management Authority.

Paratroopers carrying food and water were dropped at remote locations such as Jungal Chetti after the UAVs sent pictures of people waving for help, an official of National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) said.

Another group was spotted on an isolated hilltop ahead of Kedarnath and at Bhairav Chotti and Jungle Chotti, said Ajay Chadda, director general of Indian Tibetan Border Force.

Around 190 people were spotted by the UAVs. Many of them — mostly trekkers — were without food and water for days and had taken shelter in homes and caves.

"They were not expecting that someone would come looking for them," an NDRF official, who has been coordinating the relief operations, said. Efforts were on to get them to locations from where they could be air-lifted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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