NDRF personnel conduct a search operation on Friday for Kamal Das, who went missing in the Brahmaputra on Thursday evening. Picture by UB Photos

Guwahati, May 20: Personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) engaged in search-and-rescue operations in the Brahmaputra are finding the going tough as the underwater current in the portion of the river flowing through the city is quite strong.

“Our deep divers and rescuers posted here were provided with a six-month training in Hooghly, but it is very difficult to cope with the current in the Brahmaputra. No matter how good a swimmer, he cannot tackle a crisis in the river. Two of our deep divers fell ill yesterday after the search operations at Soonsali ghat where a student drowned,” said inspector Manik Dongre, who heads the floating response base at Kachari ghat.

The two divers — Aswini Guntiwar and M. Ghosh — fell ill after the four-hour search at Soonsali and were treated at the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital, he added.

The force’s deep divers and rescuers were trained at Sea Explorers’ Institute in Calcutta and were given practical training in the Hooghly, where the current was much slower. “Let alone Hooghly, the underwater currents of Brahmaputra are even stronger than those of the Ganga and the Godavari. We cannot even be trained in the Brahmaputra because of the strong currents and unpredictable water levels,” Dongre said.

A senior official of the inland waterways department said while the speed of Hoogly’s underwater currents was around 0.5m per second in Calcutta, that of the Brahmaputra in Guwahati was around one metre per second. “The underwater currents of the Brahmaputra are faster in Upper Assam and may be about 2.5m per second,” the official said.

Inaugurated in October last year, the floating base of the NDRF’s 1st Battalion has 45 trained personnel, including four deep divers, a fleet of 12 fibre reinforced plastic speedboats, four rubberised speedboats and state-of-the-art equipment like earthquake collapse structure search, rescue equipment and life detecting equipment.

The floating base was started for swift response to the frequent drowning incidents in the Brahmaputra, but NDRF personnel have been unable to find bodies of people drowned in the river.

They were called in hours after a Class X student, Kangkan Das, drowned at Soonsali in December last year but the deep divers and swimmers failed to find the body because of the strong underwater currents. Kangkan’s body was recovered three days later, floating a few kilometres downstream at Kachari ghat.

They are also yet to find the bodies of Class VII student Ravi Sharma and Kamal Das, 14, who went missing in the river at Soonsali and Kachari ghat on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. “We have been checking the riverbed thoroughly but the strong underwater current of the river is making our job tough. Our deep divers use heavy weights to hold themselves underwater to carry out the search,” said the NDRF inspector.

At least 37 people have drowned in the stretch of the Brahmaputra from Pandu to Soonsali in the last two years.

The NDRF, which has nine battalions across the country, is a multi-disciplinary, multi-skilled, high-tech force equipped to respond to all types of disasters. The 1st Battalion of NDRF, with 1,150 personnel, is headquartered at Patgaon on the city’s outskirts. The floating base has two units, at Changsari and Patgaon.