Rescue teams step up search for survivors of river tragedy

Agencies/Shimla, Himachal PradeshRescuers yesterday discovered five bodies in a river in Himachal Pradesh as they stepped up their search for 24 students washed away in a sudden surge of water released from a dam. The students were standing on the Beas river’s edge on Sunday evening taking photographs in the Himalayan state when they were hit by a wall of water. “In the morning five bodies have been found in the Beas river as rescue teams continue to search downstream,” senior state government official Pankaj Rai told CNN-IBN news channel. Soldiers, police and other rescue workers were seen combing the banks of the river, while others in kayaks were paddling slowly downstream, checking around boulders.  Television footage showed soldiers carrying a body bag from the river to a waiting jeep on the road above. Divers have also been called in, an official said. Some 50 engineering students were travelling on buses to the tourist hill station of Manali when they stopped in the Kullu Valley, some 200km from state capital Shimla, officials have said.  Teachers and fellow students, from an engineering college in the southern city of Hyderabad, told how they screamed at the group about the torrent of water which appeared without warning. “I did not walk down to the river but saw the sudden rise of the water and screamed to the students to run but the waters quickly engulfed and swept them away,” college staff member A Aditya told CNN-IBN. “We saw a wall of water hit those who were on the banks. They fell flat and disappeared under the waves,” one of the students told the Indian Express newspaper. The surge of water occurred when a hydroelectric power project opened its floodgates, sending tonnes of water downstream, officials said. Anger is mounting about whether any warning was given before the water’s release, with media reporting protests late Sunday by residents on the road above where the accident occurred. “I think they were playing in the water,” said a police official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media. “The water rose and they were washed away.”  “There was no warning,” said D Naidu, principal of the V N R Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology, from which 65 students had set off on the trip. Others disputed the account. Mandeep Singh, an engineer on the dam’s power plant, told CNN-IBN that staff sounded warnings before releasing the water and local residents “definitely warned the students to come out of the river” several times. Officials have launched an investigation to determine the sequence of events, said police official Rajesh Kumar, but are now focused on rescue operations to find the rest of the group. “The chances are minimal” to find them alive, he said, “but we’re trying.”    Parents of the missing students, along with Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh and a string of other top politicians, yesterday visited the accident site. In Hyderabad, distraught parents were seen gathering at the airport and the college. “My son was afraid of water, he would not go near the river. He had just turned 20. He gave the exam and went on the excursion, his results are not out yet,” one woman told NDTV. “The silent river literally turned into a watery grave within a fraction of seconds,” Kiran, one of the survivors and a faculty member, said.Another survivor Ravi Kumar said: “The water level suddenly rose to 5 or 6ft and the students who were close to the river were washed away.”He said no help came from the district administration for hours.“If the administration had reacted immediately, 10 to 15 lives could have been saved,” an emotional Kumar said.The tragedy has exposed state’s poor disaster response - rescue, relief distribution and rehabilitation, said an official.“There was a total lack of co-ordination among agencies involved in relief and rescue operations. No nodal officer was appointed at the state level to co-ordinate and monitor the operations,” said the official.Himachal Pradesh and other Himalayan states, including neighbouring Uttarakhand, are home to a string of hydroelectric projects as India rushes to expand power generation to meet rising demand.