The failure of the Indian Coast Guard to locate and salvage its Dornier aircraft even after 11 days after it went missing off the Tamil Nadu coast has raised doubts about the preparedness and efficiency of the force to meet emergencies of this kind."What we see is that the Coast Guard does not have an effective Standard Operations Procedure or Disaster Management Programme in place to meet emergencies like this,” a disaster management expert told The Pioneer on Thursday. The sudden withdrawal of India’s Sagar Nidhi, fitted with state-of-the-art search systems capable of detecting anything up to five kilometres in deep seas has surprised many. The Coast Guard IB SP Prakash, who briefed the media late on Wednesday evening, could not give any reason for the withdrawal of Sagar Nidhi.
The search and rescue operations which commenced on June 9 have not yielded any results even as the close relations of the three-member crew on board the aircraft have started doubting the Coast Guard’s operational expertise. Amrutha Soni, wife of navigator MK Soni, has asked the Coast Guard authorities to seek international assistance to locate the missing aircraft.
The aircraft , which was on a surveillance mission, lost contact with the air traffic control at 9 pm on June 8 and since then the CH has declared it went missing. The research vessel Sagar Nidhi owned by the Ministry of Earth Sciences’ National Institute of Ocean Technology, which was pressed into the search and rescue operation was withdrawn from the mission on Wednesday evening.Though the rescue team has more than a dozen ships and a submarine, no breakthrough has been made till date. According to sources in the search and rescue team, the submarine Sindhudhwaj, belonging to the Indian Navy, is incapable of going beyond a depth of 100 meters in the sea.
Though images collected from the INMARSAT satellite showed two points as the spots where the aircraft was tracked for the last time by the radars, no probe was held at the first point. Both the spots were at a distance of eight nautical miles from each other which gives rise to the authenticity of the satellite images, said the expert.
The Coast Guard’s silence on the statement by one of the fishermen, who claims to have seen a ball of fire falling into the Bay of Bengal on June 8 around the same time the aircraft went missing has not been pursued, pointed out the expert.Sagar Nidhi has the capability to scan the ocean surface with special instruments which could be lowered into the bottom of the sea. A Remotely Operated Vehicle intregrated to the vessel had gone up to a depth of almost five kilometres in the Indian Ocean in search of rare elements like Cobalt and Manganese.