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Journalism of Courage
After a robotic vehicle was deployed to scour the murky depths of the Mahi river following the July 9 Mujpur-Gambhira bridge collapse, the government of Gujarat has purchased two of these machines and assigned them to the police in Vadodara and Rajkot.
The state-of-the-art Deep Trekker Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) have been bought at a cost of Rs 2.8 crore as a pilot project. A third machine is expected to be given to the Ahmedabad Fire Service next month.
Vadodara Police Commissioner NN Komar, who had first announced plans to purchase the ROVs in 2022, said: “We have used the sonar-based underwater ROVs many times, especially when people go missing in water bodies such as rivers and canals. They are also helpful in checking underwater infrastructure and engineering projects. These ROVs that have been purchased, will be placed in Vadodara and Rajkot so that they can cover the entire Central Gujarat and Saurashtra.”
Used in past mishaps in Gujarat
Last month, a specially trained team of Vadodara Police used a Deep Trekker ROV equipped with a camera and a grabber arm to locate and retrieve a motorcycle and some other objects from the Mahisagar river bed after the collapse of the bridge. Twenty-two people were killed in the disaster.
Earlier in May, the Ahmedabad Fire and Emergency Services (AFES) had asked a private company, Amix Corporation, for help to locate and retrieve the body of a 13-year-old boy who had drowned in a pool of water that remained on bed of the Sabarmati bed after the river had been mostly drained as part of a clean-up drive.
The company used an underwater ROV to locate the body of Mohammad Hasnain Mohammed Asif Sheikh in about 12 feet of water, and retrieve it using the grabber arm.
“We are in the process of finalising the procurement of the underwater vehicle and it is likely to be in our possession and operational within a month,” Ahmedabad Chief Fire Officer Amit Dongre, told The Indian Express.
Manufacturer of the ROV robots
The government is sourcing the ROVs from Ahmedabad-based Amix Corporation. On its website, the company says it has collaborated with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), marine commandos of the Indian Navy, Western Railway, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the state-owned energy corporation GAIL India Ltd apart from the Gujarat Police.
Jay Trivedi of the company told The Indian Express that the ROVs had aided in a range of operations including search and rescue after a disaster, recovery of evidence, and the mapping of crime scenes.
“We began work in underwater ROVs in 2019, and since then, we have been able to help various agencies in different kinds of work,” Trivedi said.
“We were called to help in Patan, where the body of a murdered man had been dumped in a canal, and we were told that the body had been sunk by weighting it with a rock. While we didn’t find the body, we mapped the underwater crime scene where the stone and the rope that was used to tie it to the body, were found,” he said.
Trivedi recalled that the company had been commissioned for assistance after a military chopper crashed in Jammu and Kashmir four years ago.
An Army Aviation Helicopter had crashed in the Ranjit Sagar Dam on the Ravi river in Kathua, Jammu, in August 2021. The body of one pilot was recovered by August 15, but it took 75 days to recover the body of the second pilot from a depth of 75-80 feet. It was done using an ROV operated by his company, Trivedi said.
He said the company had also worked with Western Railway to check the structural stability of underwater sections of pillars of railway bridges such as the Silver Jubilee Railway Bridge in Bharuch on the Narmada river, which was commissioned in 1935; and had worked with the authorities after the Morbi bridge disaster in October 2022, in which more than 140 people were killed; and the Harni lake boat disaster in Vadodara in January 2024.
The portable Deep Trekker ROV purchased for the Gujarat Police can carry out underwater surveillance, post-crime videography and scene mapping, and search and evidence recovery operations up to a depth of 200 metres.
The vehicle is equipped with an Ultra High Definition (UHD) 4K camera that can record high-quality video; a 2,000-lumen light (a standard 60-watt incandescent bulb, which corresponds to a 9-watt LED, produces 800 lumens of brightness); and multibeam Sound and Navigation Ranging (SONAR) technology, in which sound waves are used to detect and locate objects and measure distances.
The ROV’s grabber arm can rotate 360 degrees, and can remove weights up to 100 kg.
Where the ROV could have helped
Officials identified at least two past instances in which these robots could have been helpful.
* In 2023, the CBI solicited the help of an expert diver called Akash Dantani in retrieving two mobile phones that had been thrown into the Sabarmati, during a corruption investigation against Income Tax officials in Ahmedabad. (Dantani had helped the Ahmedabad Crime Branch to recover a countrymade pistol that could not have been recovered using magnets since it was made of aluminium.)
* In May 2020, the NDRF searched the Kadi Canal in Mehsana for two days, and recovered 132 bottles of liquor that had been allegedly thrown in the water instead of being destroyed after seizure. Seven police officials were booked in that case.
