Telangana tunnel collapse: Rescue ops continue as TBM parts being cut to reach trapped workers
Nagarkurnool (Telangana) (PTI): Rescue teams engaged in extricating the eight trapped workers under a partially collapsed tunnel of the SLBC here are cutting down a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) to make way to reach the stranded persons, officials said on Saturday
The rescue efforts are on in full swing, a week after the engineers and labourers were trapped under the collapsed roof of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) tunnel.
Teams comprising personnel from NDRF, Army, state-run miner Singareni Collieries, rat miners and other agencies are working continuously, Nagarkurnool Superintendent of Police Vaibhav Gaikwad said.
"The rescue operation is going on... (Saturday) morning a team went inside (the tunnel)... The process of dewatering, removing debris is also going on simultaneously", the SP told PTI.
The parts of TBM are also being cut to clear the path ahead, he added.
"Whatever obstacles are coming in between (to reach the spot where they can search for trapped persons), we have to remove them."
According to an official, the damaged part of the conveyor belt in the tunnel was expected to be repaired on Saturday.
Meanwhile, scientists from the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and detected some "anomalies" inside the tunnel.
However, it is unclear what these anomalies represent, given the challenging conditions inside the tunnel, including mud and saturated water bodies, official sources said.
Rescue personnel need to examine these "anomalies" further to identify them, they added.
Eight persons, working on the SLBC tunnel project, were trapped after a portion of the tunnel collapsed on February 22.
A team of over 500 skilled personnel from the Army, Navy, Singareni Collieries and other agencies were involved in the rescue ops over the past few days.
The trapped persons have been identified as Manoj Kumar (UP), Sri Niwas (UP), Sunny Singh (J&K), Gurpreet Singh (Punjab) and Sandeep Sahu, Jegta Xess, Santosh Sahu and Anuj Sahu, all from Jharkhand.
Of the eight, two are engineers, two are operators and the remaining four are labourers from Jharkhand.
The two engineers and four labourers are working for Jaiprakash Associates, the contracting firm of SLBC tunnel project.
State Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy, Excise Minister Jupally Krishna Rao, Chief Secretary Santhi Kumari left for the accident site from here, sources said.
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Rahul Gandhi demands 'clean, pure' voter list; says 'vote theft' issue will explode soon
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New Delhi (PTI): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the Opposition is protesting for the right to vote for every Indian and demanded a "clean and pure" voter list, asserting that the issue of alleged irregularities pointed out by him will "explode" soon as it is not related to a single constituency but the whole country.
Indicating that he would not submit a signed affidavit as sought by the Election Commission, Gandhi asserted that the data analysed by the Congress to provide "proof" of "vote theft" is taken from the EC website.
"This is their data. It is not my data that I should sign. It is their data only and has been taken from their website. This is only a move to distract," he told reporters.
The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, who participated in a protest march by the opposition on the "vote theft" issue, said the Election Commission is "silent" as the truth is before the entire nation after his charge that over one lakh votes in an assembly constituency in Karnataka were found to be fake in a research conducted by his party.
"Another thing I want to tell is that this has not just happened in Bangalore, but in different constituencies across the country, and the Election Commission knows this. The EC knows that this data will explode. What it is trying to control and hide, we will bring it out, and it will explode. The EC knows this," he told reporters.
Gandhi was briefly detained along with others as police stopped the protest march by opposition MPs from Parliament House to the EC office.
"They (EC) cannot talk as the truth is before the entire nation," the Congress leader said as he was being taken away in a bus by the police.
"This fight is not political, but for saving the Constitution," he asserted.
This fight is for 'one man, one vote' and we want a clean, pure voter list," the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha added.
He said all the MPs of the INDIA alliance were stopped and taken into custody when they were going to meet the Election Commission.
"The truth of 'vote theft' is now before the country. This fight is not political; it is a fight to protect democracy, the Constitution, and the right to ‘one person, one vote’.
"The united opposition and every voter in the country demand a clean and transparent voter list. And, we will secure this right at all costs," Gandhi claimed in a post on X later.
Gandhi had on Thursday cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" through five types of manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka. He alleged there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.
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