Uttarakhand: Over 8,000 troops, 50 choppers engaged in rescue work

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New Delhi: With 2,000 people left to be evacuated from places including Badrinath and Harsil, the defence forces have deployed around 50 helicopters and over 8,000 troops in flood-hit Uttarakhand.
The IAF has deployed 37 choppers along with 13 helicopters of the Army.
Together, they have flown 84 sorties in the last 24 hours for evacuating the stranded pilgrims in the state, a Defence Ministry release said.
The armed forces have been successful in bringing out over 650 people from the pilgrimage town of Badrinath and Harsil in the last 24 hours, it said.
In the operations which started on June 17, the two forces have deployed over 60 choppers which have flown 2,518 sorties and overall evacuated around 46,000 people from the higher reaches of the state.
Meanwhile, IAF Chief Air Chief Marshal N.A. K. Browne received the bodies of the five IAF personnel who were killed in a helicopter crash on Tuesday.
The Airforce also carried out a mission using its ALH Dhruv choppers in Gaurikund to bring the bodies from the crash site for postmortem and for DNA analysis at Dehradun.
Wing Commander Daryll Castellino, Flight Lieutenants Tapan Kapoor and K. Praveen, Junior Warrant Officer A.K. Singh and Sergeant Sudhakar Yadav were among the 20 people who lost their lives in the chopper crash.
Next: 119 pilgrims from AP still 'out of contact' in Uttarakhand

119 pilgrims from AP still 'out of contact' in Uttarakhand
Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh government said tonight that 119 pilgrims from the state still remained ‘out of contact’ in calamity-hit Uttarakhand. They are among the 400 pilgrims from the southern state who are stranded in Uttarakhand which was hit by heavy rains and landslides in mid-June.
Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy reviewed the situation with Chief Secretary P.K. Mohanty and other top officials this evening.
Official sources quoted Reddy as saying that two special flights were being readied to bring back the stranded pilgrims from Andhra Pradesh.
According to officials, 2,747 pilgrims from Andhra Pradesh were on ‘Chardham Yatra’ to the hill state when the calamity had struck.
A majority of them have been rescued and sent back to Andhra Pradesh. Around 400 pilgrims are reported to be still in Uttarakhand. These include 119 pilgrims, who are ‘out of contact’ with their families, a release from the Chief Minister's Office said.
The Chief Secretary is coordinating the rescue and relief operations with his Uttarakhand counterpart. A team of IAS and IPS officers from the state is also supervising the operations, the release added.