Beacon link in Isro 'failure'

Dorjee Khandu

Guwahati, Aug. 18: The Centre today attributed the inability of Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) to detect the debris of the Pawan Hans chopper — that crashed with Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu on board along with four others on April 30 — to the absence of a standard distress alert beacon in the helicopter.

Union minister of state in the ministry of personnel and also in the Prime Minister’s office, V. Narayanasamy, replying on behalf of Manmohan Singh, cited the reason in response to a query by Assam PCC president and MP Bhubaneswar Kalita in the Rajya Sabha. Kalita had asked whether Isro satellites had been able to detect the debris of the chopper that crashed in that state.

“No. If the crashed helicopter had carried a standard distress alert beacon, chances of a search and rescue satellite detecting the crash would have been more. The debris could not be located through our remote sensing satellites as these small objects were in a region covered with thick forest,” he stated.

Narayanasamy, who was monitoring the search operations, further said that the microwave remote sensing satellites planned for the future would improve the possibility of detection under cloud cover but it would be very difficult to detect debris of very small size in a region with a thick forest cover.

The bodies and the debris were sighted by local people of Luguthung area in Tawang district on April 4. The state and central governments had mobilised search and rescue operations involving the IAF, Isro, army, paramilitary police and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel in Arunachal and the bordering areas of Assam and Bhutan, but not much headway was made.

The minister, however, asserted that the Isro failure would not pose any threat to the guarding of the sensitive border with China which still stakes territorial claim over the mountainous state.

The delay in sighting the bodies and the wreckage had evoked angry reactions in the state.

The All Arunachal Pradesh Students’ Union and the Arunachal Citizens Rights were among the organisations which questioned the Centre’s preparedness to tackle emergencies, more so in a frontier state such as Arunachal Pradesh which shares a 1,030-km unfenced border with China.