All eyes on Hyderabad-based Navayuga Engineering as 41 workers remain trapped in Uttarakhand Tunnel

After multiple failed plans, the agencies taking part in the rescue operations have commenced vertical drilling of the hill in Silkyara on Sunday.

Hyderabad: As the country celebrated Diwali on November 12, 41 labourers working at the Silkyara-Dandalgaon under construction-tunnel on the Brahmkhal-Yamunotri highway, got trapped inside following a landslide around 5:30 am.

About 16 days since the incident has occurred, multiple agencies including NDRF, SDRF, BRO, project executing NHIDCL and ITBP have been pressed into action to rescue the trapped labourers, with little to no success so far.

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After multiple failed plans, the agencies taking part in the rescue operations have commenced vertical drilling of the hill in Silkyara on Sunday. In the fast paced operation, the vertical drilling machine has drilled  up 20 meters of the hill, with about 86 meters still left to be dug out as on Monday afternoon.

While all the focus has been around the rescue operations, there has been little information about the agency which is responsible for the construction of the tunnel which has collapsed.

A Hyderabad-based construction firm, Navayuga Engineering Company Limited, is responsible for the tunnel’s construction.  In its most prominent earlier works, the construction firm has developed the greenfield Krishnapatnam deep water sea port in 2008.

Navayuga Engineering, however, has been in the news for wrong reasons of late.

Earlier this year, a case was booked against contractors of the Hyderabad-based firm for causing death by negligence after a 700 metric tonne viaduct launcher gantry and a 1,250 metric tonne girder launcher collapsed on the Package 16 of the Samruddhi Expressway (the 701-km highway between Mumbai and Nagrpur), killing 20 workers.

The Silkyara tunnel collapse crisis comes barely three months after the 20 workers and engineers lost their lives in the mishap that took place at Maharashtra’s Thane.

Although Adani Group had been linked to the tunnel collapse in various reports, the group has issued a clarification saying that none of its subsidiaries have any direct or indirect involvement of any kind in the construction of the tunnel.