The Centre on Friday projected a grim picture of the rescue operations to save the lives of 15 miners trapped in a coal mine in Meghalaya and told the Supreme Court that the task is tougher than the Thailand government’s extraordinary cave rescue operation last year.Appearing before a bench of Justices A K Sikri and S Abdul Nazeer, solicitor general Tushar Mehta said the mines are more than 350 feet deep and there is no blueprint of the maze of rat holes inside the mines where people are trapped, so it is difficult to locate them.Mehta and Meghalaya’s advocate general Amit Kumar said experts from national and state disaster response forces, Navy and Coal India were involved in the operations and they were making all-out efforts to rescue the miners, trapped since December 14.Referring to the Thailand operation in which twelve members of a football team and their coach were rescued after being trapped in a cave for 18 days, the solicitor general said unlike the Thailand case, there is no sketch of the inside structure of the mines as they are illegal.“In Thailand case, there was blueprint of the caves and water was clean but water inside mines is murky and divers cannot go beyond a particular depth. We have employed powerful water pumps, which take out out at the rate of 1800 litres per minute but the water level is not receding as it is connected to a nearby river and mines are 10 feet below the river,” he said.He said seepage of water from river cannot be stopped as the authorities had not been able to locate the point from where rive water was coming inside the mines.Senior advocate Anand Grover , appearing for the petitioner, however, countered the Centre’s stand and told the bench that high power pumps had not been deployed so far and there was no generator available at the site to provide electricity. He also said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has got technology by which the location of trapped mines could be found out and the Centre should take its assistance.The court. after hearing both the sides, expressed satisfaction on the steps taken by the Centre and agreed to monitor the operations. It directed the Centre and Meghalaya government to file status report on action taken by them and progress in the operations on January 7.Around 72 people from NDRF, 22 from SDRF, 14 Navy personnel and 10 Coal India personnel are involved in the rescue operation.

Stay updated with all the Latest Shillong headlines here. For more exclusive & live news updates from all around India, stay connected with NYOOOZ.