KALPETTA: The landslip at the Kalladi tunnel road construction site in Wayanad has struck a devastating blow to families across the country, including that of assistant surveyor Rakesh Gochhait (Guchait), whose body was recovered on Friday.
Son of a carpenter, 24-year-old Rakesh hailed from East Midnapore in West Bengal. Driven by the desire to uplift his family, he had earned his engineering diploma while working simultaneously. The twin-tunnel project was his very first professional assignment in South India.
“He worked tirelessly to earn his diploma while balancing jobs. He was always looking for better opportunities to support us,” said an emotional Prithviraj, Rakesh’s father.
Following a midnight notification from the police on Tuesday, the grieving family rushed to Kerala to repatriate his remains via a cargo flight from Kochi to Kolkata.
Before Rakesh, the disaster claimed six lives, three of them on Tuesday. The first body recovered was that of Anmol Dodrai, 25, who had moved to Kerala from Jharkhand five months ago to build a house and earn money to start a new family.
Besides him, bodies of equipment operator Chandrabhan Pal, 37, from Madhya Pradesh and civil foreman Bikash Kumar Singh, 40, from Bihar were also found on Tuesday. On Thursday, rescue teams retrieved three more bodies, including that of 27-year-old site engineer Rahul Sharma from Himachal Pradesh. He had tied the knot just months ago on February 21 with 20-year-old Kalpana.
On Tuesday, Rahul had gone to work for his usual morning shift when the landslip buried the project site. His father Roopdev Sharma, his brother Rohit and other relatives rushed to Wayanad from Himachal Pradesh and Dubai upon hearing the news.
Surveyor Azharuddin Ansari, 32, from Uttar Pradesh and excavator driver Muhammad Imran Ansari, 31, from Bihar, were the others whose bodies were recovered on Thursday. Imran was buried under the construction company’s temporary office just a day after his only daughter Asifa’s first birthday, leaving his wife Shabnam devastated and hospitalised with grief.
Kin pray for miracle
Agonising wait continues for the family of Vikram Rana, a construction manager from Himachal Pradesh, who is still missing. He had called his wife Shashi moments before the landslip struck. For more than two days, his brothers Kulwant and Pramod have been waiting at the site, hoping against hope for a miracle.