An engineer from London and his friend from Pune, along with 10 other youngsters, have been fighting against odds to trace their missing parents for the past eleven days. This is not just a story of their love and determination, but also of the state government machinery’s approach to the rescue work, an approach that ranges from casual callousness to plain incompetence in understanding how to collect and use data.
On June 11, a group of sixty seven started from Pune by the Kolhapur-Nizamuddin express. Most members of the group were people in the age group of 55-65; many of them were parents of young professionals such as engineers and doctors. The group was led by Sudheer Kulkarni of Pune-based Shiv Gowri Travels. Kulkarni is a veteran of the ‘Chardham’ circuit and has been bringing pilgrims from Pune every year, for the past 30 years. “June 10 is my date. Sometimes, I do two trips a year,” he says.
After stopovers at Delhi and Haridwar, the group reached Phata, on the road to Gaurikund, the base camp for Kedarnath, on June 14. From Gaurikund, it is a steep, 14-km trek to Kedarnath; the route passes through Jangle Chatti, Rambara and Garud Chatti, each three-four km apart.
The 12 youngsters from Pune, led by Prashant Jagdale and Yogesh Shinde, are trying to locate and rescue the remaining 22. Jagdale’s mother Kalavathi Jagdale, 59, and Shinde’s parents, Vijay and Alkha, 64 and 60, respectively, are among the 22 missing.
In this region, the devastation at Kedarnath and Rambara on the night of June 16 was the most severe. While everything except the temple was destroyed in Kedarnath, Rambara was practically wiped off the map. Jagdale and Shinde said their parents had passed both these sites hours before the disaster struck and now, they were probably held up somewhere in the jungle.
By the evening of June 15, when Kulkarni and his troupe reached Kedarnath, it had already started raining. After a darshan and pooja at the temple, the group started their return trek to Gaurikund. A group of about 40, led by Kulkarni, moved ahead; a second group followed, with a lag of about an hour.
At Rambara, the river Mandakini turns right, before turning right again---it forms an inverted ‘C’. On the right bank was the Rambara market, with a couple of guest houses, including a Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam guesthouse. On the far side of it was the pilgrim’s footpath and a railing. The river was at least 20-25 feet away, Kulkarni said.
However, three days later, when Kulkarni returned to search for the others, he saw a different sight. “Rambara was absolute shamshan (graveyard). There were dead bodies all around.”
Fed by overnight rains, as the river started swelling on the morning of June 16, it started flooding the Rambara market. This triggered rumours, which made the pilgrims rush ahead.
Pilgrims unable to do the trek by themselves use dolis, hired through a prepaid system at Gaurikund. They charge about Rs 8,000 (per person) for a return trip and are operated by the state government. Pilgrims who ask for a doli are allotted one, with four porters; a tag is handed over to the pilgrim. As the payment is made after the doli brings the pilgrims back, dolis are responsible for their passengers.
Kulkarni said five women from the group, who had ordered dolis, had to start late, as the porters wanted to wait for the rains to subside. This group, along with their relatives and close ones, formed the second group, which leaved Kedarnath about an hour later. This group reached Rambara at about 11.30 am. The Gurav couple, part of the first group, had stayed back at Rambara. The last time the missing group was spotted was when it passed the Gurav couple at Rambara.
Though the floods were reported, not much information on Kedarnath was available. After the pictures of Kedarnath were flashed, Shinde and others reached Dehradun. Jagdale, who was in London, joined the others on Friday. “I saw the picture in the Times on Wednesday. I was shocked; I knew it was bad.”
Shinde had last spoken to his mother last on June 15. “The first three days were bad,” he recalls. On June 19, there was good news---the Gurav couple, which had climbed on to trees near the Rambara ranges, was rescued by choppers.
Now, the team has divided themselves into groups of two-three people. “We are scanning every exit point to find our parents, hoping they have been rescued and put on one of those buses or choppers…We kept looking at the list of survivors put up at Dehradun.”
However, after a point, they realised things weren’t being done the way they should have been. “We first realised something was wrong when these 44 people were rescued on the 22nd and their name did not figure in any list,” Jagdale said.
The engineers clung on to the eye-witness account of the Gurav couple. “I have a father at home, and he is a heart patient. I can’t go back home without knowing exactly what happened to my mother,” Jagdale said.
Then, the team decided to step up its efforts. The primary hurdle in rescue efforts is that the government does not maintain a central register. “Data is being collected at different centres…numbers are given and lists are being pasted without keeping in mind the people who would want to use these,” Jagdale said.
Clerks record arrivals manually, in registers. These records can neither be aggregated quickly, nor can these be used for analysis or investigation. “They could have supplied these people with tabs and if they had entered the data in an excel sheet, aggregation and analysis would have been much faster. A company like ours could have done it in no time,” says Shinde, who works with a software services company as a senior project engineer.
But computers & tabs and the Uttarakhand government are far removed from each other.
After hearing at the Jolly Grant Airport that a group of 200 were lying unconscious at the Rudraprayag hospital, Jagdale and Shinde hitched a ride on a relief helicopter to Guptakashi, the hub of operations at Kedarnath. There, they met Kulkarni, who had been rescued on June 22.
Guptakashi had two different lists of survivors. The Air Force maintained a common list of arrivals for three helipads in the area; state government officials, who were despatching people by road to different places, were maintaining a second one.
“This register had the names of people and the registration numbers of vehicles in which they were put in. It did not have the destination of these vehicles. If I were to look for someone put on these vehicles, where should I go? Haridwar, Rishikesh, Dehradun, or somewhere else?” Jagdale asks.
Finding the destination was critical, because the Dalvi couple, which had stayed back at Rambara on that fateful night had been rescued, their son informed. They were said to have landed at Guptakashi. But further movement could not be traced.
Further, the helipad at Phata, 13 km from Guptakashi, maintained a separate list of survivors and there was no information of people rescued from there at the nearest centre, Guptakashi. “There is no road left between Guptakashi and Phata. So, the only way to find this out is to take a chopper and go.”
That wasn’t all. “When the duo reached the Rudraprayag hospital, they found it wasn’t big enough for 50 people (not to mention 200) “We thought this is where 200 people are staying?” The duo said after surveying several places in the Rudraprayag district, they found there were no hospitals to treat 200 people in the entire district.
Realising it was a rumour, they reached out to the police superintendent of Rudraprayag. “One of our first requests was to access the data of dolis and track these down. There were several hundreds of them.”
The superintendent said, “We have sealed the border, so that no Nepali can escape the country with any human or valuable.”
Doliwalas are god-fearing; they don’t kill. But they are not averse to taking things off dead people. Led by this perverse logic, Shinde said, “Some of them possibly misled people and took them round in circles inside the jungles for days, so that they were eventually tired and dehydrated. After they died, they could be looted.”
Jagdale was confident if some of the dolis were traced and debriefed, they could provide vital clues for rescue operations. But the police was in no mood to help. When the duo insisted on checking the records of dolis, a police official said it was with the district magistrate.
But the district magistrate, too, didn’t have any idea about this data. And retrieving this data seemed difficult, as now, Gaurikund, too, was destroyed.
In the meantime, Kulkarni had managed to trek down to Gaurikund and walk back up. He said the area was completely devastated. “There were two deep cuts on the road about 20 feet deep. One had to climb down 20 feet and climb up to reach the other end. Then, on reaching Gaurikund, there’s nothing. The parking, the prepaid counters, everything is gone. The entire table on which the town was located has come down.”
The bodies of the dead were fed to the river. “Gaekwad sir and Hingare madam did not survive. We could not cremate or carry them. We left them in the river. After all, they were going into the Ganges.”
About 400 people, along with Kulkarni’s group, were rescued from Jangle Chatti. Now, Shinde and Jagdale, who are in Gauchar, are trying to talk to the sadhus rescued from Kedarnath to understand the terrain.
“Tracing Dalvi is key…Because he can tell us what happened… We are trying to give the Army and the Air Force specific inputs to help in their search efforts. We are also try to check remote exit points such as Joshimath near Kedarnath, where some of the people rescued by helicopter were dropped,” Jagdale said.
Efforts are underway to try and retrieve call data records and location details from the mobile phones of the missing 22 people.
Shinde is determined. “The police superintendent at Rudraprayag was trying to show me the pictures of Rambara. He suggested we had to be realistic. I want to get my parents back and show him how the job cant be done by sitting in office.”
On June 11, a group of sixty seven started from Pune by the Kolhapur-Nizamuddin express. Most members of the group were people in the age group of 55-65; many of them were parents of young professionals such as engineers and doctors. The group was led by Sudheer Kulkarni of Pune-based Shiv Gowri Travels. Kulkarni is a veteran of the ‘Chardham’ circuit and has been bringing pilgrims from Pune every year, for the past 30 years. “June 10 is my date. Sometimes, I do two trips a year,” he says.
After stopovers at Delhi and Haridwar, the group reached Phata, on the road to Gaurikund, the base camp for Kedarnath, on June 14. From Gaurikund, it is a steep, 14-km trek to Kedarnath; the route passes through Jangle Chatti, Rambara and Garud Chatti, each three-four km apart.
More From This Section
Kulkarni, along with 39 others, were rescued from Jangle Chatti on June 22. Four others have been rescued in separate operations. Two group members died at Jangle Chatti, while waiting to be rescued.
The 12 youngsters from Pune, led by Prashant Jagdale and Yogesh Shinde, are trying to locate and rescue the remaining 22. Jagdale’s mother Kalavathi Jagdale, 59, and Shinde’s parents, Vijay and Alkha, 64 and 60, respectively, are among the 22 missing.
In this region, the devastation at Kedarnath and Rambara on the night of June 16 was the most severe. While everything except the temple was destroyed in Kedarnath, Rambara was practically wiped off the map. Jagdale and Shinde said their parents had passed both these sites hours before the disaster struck and now, they were probably held up somewhere in the jungle.
By the evening of June 15, when Kulkarni and his troupe reached Kedarnath, it had already started raining. After a darshan and pooja at the temple, the group started their return trek to Gaurikund. A group of about 40, led by Kulkarni, moved ahead; a second group followed, with a lag of about an hour.
At Rambara, the river Mandakini turns right, before turning right again---it forms an inverted ‘C’. On the right bank was the Rambara market, with a couple of guest houses, including a Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam guesthouse. On the far side of it was the pilgrim’s footpath and a railing. The river was at least 20-25 feet away, Kulkarni said.
However, three days later, when Kulkarni returned to search for the others, he saw a different sight. “Rambara was absolute shamshan (graveyard). There were dead bodies all around.”
Fed by overnight rains, as the river started swelling on the morning of June 16, it started flooding the Rambara market. This triggered rumours, which made the pilgrims rush ahead.
Pilgrims unable to do the trek by themselves use dolis, hired through a prepaid system at Gaurikund. They charge about Rs 8,000 (per person) for a return trip and are operated by the state government. Pilgrims who ask for a doli are allotted one, with four porters; a tag is handed over to the pilgrim. As the payment is made after the doli brings the pilgrims back, dolis are responsible for their passengers.
Kulkarni said five women from the group, who had ordered dolis, had to start late, as the porters wanted to wait for the rains to subside. This group, along with their relatives and close ones, formed the second group, which leaved Kedarnath about an hour later. This group reached Rambara at about 11.30 am. The Gurav couple, part of the first group, had stayed back at Rambara. The last time the missing group was spotted was when it passed the Gurav couple at Rambara.
Though the floods were reported, not much information on Kedarnath was available. After the pictures of Kedarnath were flashed, Shinde and others reached Dehradun. Jagdale, who was in London, joined the others on Friday. “I saw the picture in the Times on Wednesday. I was shocked; I knew it was bad.”
Shinde had last spoken to his mother last on June 15. “The first three days were bad,” he recalls. On June 19, there was good news---the Gurav couple, which had climbed on to trees near the Rambara ranges, was rescued by choppers.
Now, the team has divided themselves into groups of two-three people. “We are scanning every exit point to find our parents, hoping they have been rescued and put on one of those buses or choppers…We kept looking at the list of survivors put up at Dehradun.”
However, after a point, they realised things weren’t being done the way they should have been. “We first realised something was wrong when these 44 people were rescued on the 22nd and their name did not figure in any list,” Jagdale said.
The engineers clung on to the eye-witness account of the Gurav couple. “I have a father at home, and he is a heart patient. I can’t go back home without knowing exactly what happened to my mother,” Jagdale said.
Then, the team decided to step up its efforts. The primary hurdle in rescue efforts is that the government does not maintain a central register. “Data is being collected at different centres…numbers are given and lists are being pasted without keeping in mind the people who would want to use these,” Jagdale said.
Clerks record arrivals manually, in registers. These records can neither be aggregated quickly, nor can these be used for analysis or investigation. “They could have supplied these people with tabs and if they had entered the data in an excel sheet, aggregation and analysis would have been much faster. A company like ours could have done it in no time,” says Shinde, who works with a software services company as a senior project engineer.
But computers & tabs and the Uttarakhand government are far removed from each other.
After hearing at the Jolly Grant Airport that a group of 200 were lying unconscious at the Rudraprayag hospital, Jagdale and Shinde hitched a ride on a relief helicopter to Guptakashi, the hub of operations at Kedarnath. There, they met Kulkarni, who had been rescued on June 22.
Guptakashi had two different lists of survivors. The Air Force maintained a common list of arrivals for three helipads in the area; state government officials, who were despatching people by road to different places, were maintaining a second one.
“This register had the names of people and the registration numbers of vehicles in which they were put in. It did not have the destination of these vehicles. If I were to look for someone put on these vehicles, where should I go? Haridwar, Rishikesh, Dehradun, or somewhere else?” Jagdale asks.
Finding the destination was critical, because the Dalvi couple, which had stayed back at Rambara on that fateful night had been rescued, their son informed. They were said to have landed at Guptakashi. But further movement could not be traced.
Further, the helipad at Phata, 13 km from Guptakashi, maintained a separate list of survivors and there was no information of people rescued from there at the nearest centre, Guptakashi. “There is no road left between Guptakashi and Phata. So, the only way to find this out is to take a chopper and go.”
That wasn’t all. “When the duo reached the Rudraprayag hospital, they found it wasn’t big enough for 50 people (not to mention 200) “We thought this is where 200 people are staying?” The duo said after surveying several places in the Rudraprayag district, they found there were no hospitals to treat 200 people in the entire district.
Realising it was a rumour, they reached out to the police superintendent of Rudraprayag. “One of our first requests was to access the data of dolis and track these down. There were several hundreds of them.”
The superintendent said, “We have sealed the border, so that no Nepali can escape the country with any human or valuable.”
Doliwalas are god-fearing; they don’t kill. But they are not averse to taking things off dead people. Led by this perverse logic, Shinde said, “Some of them possibly misled people and took them round in circles inside the jungles for days, so that they were eventually tired and dehydrated. After they died, they could be looted.”
Jagdale was confident if some of the dolis were traced and debriefed, they could provide vital clues for rescue operations. But the police was in no mood to help. When the duo insisted on checking the records of dolis, a police official said it was with the district magistrate.
But the district magistrate, too, didn’t have any idea about this data. And retrieving this data seemed difficult, as now, Gaurikund, too, was destroyed.
In the meantime, Kulkarni had managed to trek down to Gaurikund and walk back up. He said the area was completely devastated. “There were two deep cuts on the road about 20 feet deep. One had to climb down 20 feet and climb up to reach the other end. Then, on reaching Gaurikund, there’s nothing. The parking, the prepaid counters, everything is gone. The entire table on which the town was located has come down.”
The bodies of the dead were fed to the river. “Gaekwad sir and Hingare madam did not survive. We could not cremate or carry them. We left them in the river. After all, they were going into the Ganges.”
About 400 people, along with Kulkarni’s group, were rescued from Jangle Chatti. Now, Shinde and Jagdale, who are in Gauchar, are trying to talk to the sadhus rescued from Kedarnath to understand the terrain.
“Tracing Dalvi is key…Because he can tell us what happened… We are trying to give the Army and the Air Force specific inputs to help in their search efforts. We are also try to check remote exit points such as Joshimath near Kedarnath, where some of the people rescued by helicopter were dropped,” Jagdale said.
Efforts are underway to try and retrieve call data records and location details from the mobile phones of the missing 22 people.
Shinde is determined. “The police superintendent at Rudraprayag was trying to show me the pictures of Rambara. He suggested we had to be realistic. I want to get my parents back and show him how the job cant be done by sitting in office.”