Unlike borewell rescue, less sensationalism for Deoghar mishap, but will aftermath be different too?

At some point in the 46-hour rescue, Binay Kumar Das asked his family members to urinate in the empty water bottles; there was no water left. They were among 60 passengers stranded mid-air in cable cars along the 766-metre ropeway at Deoghar’s Trikut hills in Jharkhand. Before the ordeal could force them to consume urine, they were rescued while three tourists couldn’t make it.

Among the three dead, Sumati Devi was fatally injured in a collision of cabin cars triggered by the snapping of a portion of the ropeway wire. Rakesh Nandan fell to death after slipping off the rescue chopper during the airlift and Shobha Devi couldn’t survive injuries while being extricated from an entangled safety belt.

The challenges of the rescue were daunting for the National Disaster Response Force, Indian Air Force, Army, Indo Tibetan Border Police and the state police. With cabin cars hanging close to the hills, the limited flying space was an obstacle. This could be overcome only after a few aborted sorties showed a more precise approach to the rescue points.

As the helicopters hovered, the hopes of the stranded flickered midair and their relatives got jittery on the ground. With the rescue stretching to almost two days, the topography and the enclosed shape of the cabins meant that drones had a tough time delivering food and water to the stranded. While some of the stranded weren’t from faraway places in the state, a few were tourists from the neighbouring states of Bihar and West Bengal. They got back to the ground – some dehydrated, shocked, exhausted, and a few quite disinterested in giving any immediate reactions to their families, officials and the media awaiting them. The same day, the Jharkhand High Court took suo motu cognizance of the accident and ordered an inquiry into the cause. The next evening, the Prime Minister had a video interaction with the personnel involved in administering and executing the rescue and applauded them.

As more details trickled in, the early rescue efforts made by locals, such as hill guide Pannalal, also got a share of media attention and state recognition. The crucial role of the district administration in supervising the rescue could be seen in the PM’s interaction with Manjunath Bhajantri, Deoghar’s deputy commissioner.

The Damodar Ropeway and Infra Limited, the private firm contracted by the state government-run Jharkhand tourism development corporation, manages ropeways at 18 places across India and claims to have never come across any mishap like this. It had even passed a safety audit last month and JTDC maintained that the firm had a negligible record of lapses.

Even as the state government ordered a detailed inquiry, DRIL’s befuddled management has initiated its own internal probe into the accident. The cause of the mishap seems lost in a number of floating possibilities. After running the ropeway for two years, the state government had handed over the operational duties of the ropeway to DRIL in 2009 – the firm had also constructed the ropeway.

As is often the case, the accident has turned the focus to the safety protocol and maintenance of other ropeways around the county. The heritage town of Rajgir, in the neighbouring state of Bihar, boasts of the country’s oldest ropeway service. In 1969, the service started as a gift from Fuji Nichidatsu, a Japanese monk who had founded the Nipponzan-Myohoji school of Buddhism. Last year, the state government’s Bihar Tourism Development Corporation added to it by starting two new ropeways at Ratnagiri at Rajgir and Mandar hills in Banka, with eight-seater and four-seater cable cars, respectively. The new ropeways have been built by Rail India Technical and Economic Service Limited, a central government undertaking, while the Conveyor and Ropeway Services Pvt Ltd, a private firm, takes care of the maintenance work of all the three.

In Rajgir as well as Banka, there is renewed assurance of the rigorous security checks and the safety practices followed. In the last two decades, three minor mishaps – in 2009, 2017 and 2019 – have ended in successful rescue operations without any loss of life. That, however, doesn’t dispel a newfound skepticism about the safety norms in wake of the Deoghar mishap.

Even if it’s a freakish mishap, and a random one in ropeway mobility, doubts can linger in a country where many still need prodding to even step on an escalator. As people negotiate death, injury and escape on Indian roads, the scars of an abrupt end to life and agonising hours of stranded mid-air rescue on an amusement trip, is the stuff of nightmares. Despite most passengers being valiantly rescued, the macabre visuals of a man slipping away from life after being so close to grabbing it back on a rescue helicopter would haunt public memory for some time to come.

In the early years of this century, television news in India had turned the successful effort to rescue a four-year-old child from a 60 metre borewell in Haryana into a one-and-a-half page moment – as a sociologist had put it. The 24-hour coverage had elements of sensationalism, but came from the unfolding drama of a real event, as seen on front pages. From the depths of a borewell to the heights of a ropeway along hills, however, the scene shifted. The mid-air collision of cable cars on a ropeway didn’t allow television crews the luxury of getting close enough to the site, to sensationalise agony.

There is, however, another distinction that would matter even more. The national attention on the borewell rescue a decade-and-half ago didn’t mean an end to lives lost to uncovered borewells and potholes in the years to come. The ropeway mishap on Trikut hill should be the last tale of horror heard from unsuspecting tourists trying to have their way with aerial movement along hills.