More skeletal remains found on Kedarnath-Triyuginarayan route

DEHRADUN: A day after skeletal remains of over 20 victims believed to have perished during the June 2013 flash floods in Kedarnath were found, a joint team of Uttarakhand police and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) recovered more human remains on the Kedarnath-Triyuginarayan trek route on Sunday.
Speaking to TOI, inspector general of police (IG) Garhwal range, Sanjay Gunjyal, who is heading the operation, confirmed that more remains had been found but refused to divulge exact details or numbers saying that “the search operation on the 27-km trek is still continuing and details would be forthcoming by Monday.”
According to sources, two separate teams had been formed for the combing operation.While one team comprising police, SDRF personnel, doctors and priests had left from Kedarnath for Triyuginarayan, the other team was climbing up from Triyuginarayan to Kedarnath. The objective behind having two teams, sources said, was to ensure that the entire area was extensively searched for the remains.
On Sunday, the joint teams also performed cremations as per Hindu rituals of a few of the remains found on Saturday. “Some remains were cremated by our teams but more will be cremated on Monday. DNA samples have been collected from all the remains,” said Prahalad Singh Meena, superintendent of police (SP) Rudraprayag, who is a part of the joint search operation.
A number of skeletal remains -- some reports pegged them to be over 50 although officials claimed the number was closer to 20 -- were spotted by a team of trekkers, who were part of the recently concluded Hito Kedar project in which over 200 trekkers took eight different routes to reach the Kedarnath shrine. Later, based on the report submitted by the trekking team, CM Harish Rawat had asked for an immediate search operation to recover the remains.
Manoj Rawat, president of the Mountaineering and Trekkers Association (MATA), who had executed the Hito Kedar project, told TOI, “The skeletons are spread over a 50 square kilometre area around Kedar valley. Most of the victims seem to be locals from Rambara and Kedarnath area, as no outsider would have dared to take the Triyuginarayan route which is a precarious one. There is no water available on almost a 22-km stretch of the 27-km long trek and I think most people would have died of thirst and hunger.”
The discovery of the remains more than three years after the tragedy has also led to the opposition BJP attacking the state government for not doing enough to trace those who had gone missing after the deluge. Raghav Langar, district magistrate of Rudraprayag, was quoted by news agency PTI as saying on Sunday that the hue and cry over the discovery was “surprising.” “Just look at the magnitude of the calamity. From Kedar valley alone, 3985 people went missing who were later declared dead. Out of this, skeletal remains of only 827 were found and disposed of. The rest are still untraced and lying somewhere buried under tonnes of debris. In the light of this fact I would not be surprised if human skeletal remains are found in Kedar valley even 25 years from now,” he said.