Forty three persons who were trapped in three cable cars in Trikut Hills in Jharkhand’s Deoghar district were rescued on Tuesday, The Indian Express reported. The operation lasted 40 hours.
The accident took place on Sunday after a pulley of one of the trolleys got stuck midway.
Manjunath Bhajantri, the deputy commissioner of Deoghar district, said that the rescue operation was undertaken by the members of the Indian Air Force, the Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and the National Disaster Response Force.
According to The Indian Express and NDTV, the death toll increased to three on Tuesday. Twelve people who were injured in the accident were being treated at the hospital, unidentified officials said.
Meanwhile, the Jharkhand High Court, on Tuesday, took suo motu cognisance of the ropeway incident, and ordered an inquiry in the matter, ANI reported.
The state was asked to file a detailed inquiry report through an affidavit. The court will hear the matter on April 26.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren on Tuesday announced a high-level inquiry into the accident, ANI reported. “The rescue operation at the Trikut mountain has been completed,” he said in a tweet. “Unfortunately we lost some people in this accident.”
Meanwhile, the Jharkhand’s BJP chief Deepak Prakash on Tuesday blamed the state government for the accident, ANI reported.
“The people who were operating should have been controlled, the rules should have been strictly followed,” Prakash said. “But the state government did not pay any attention to all these things, the result came in the form of an accident.”
He demanded that a first information report be registered against the persons found guilty. He added that the family members of the deceased persons should be compensated.
The state tourism department called the incident “unfortunate”, and said that they had hired the company only after a performance assessment. DRIL, which operated the system, had a clean record, according to a tourism department official, PTI reported.
Alok Prasad, the general manager of Jharkhand Tourism Development Corporation, said that DRIL was “India’s only company which had a negligible record of untoward incidents”, PTI reported. It operates ropeways in around 40 locations in the country, he said.
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