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| Kamlesh Joshi, IAS |
A PAWAN HANS helicopter with deputy commissioner of Arunachal
Pradesh’s Tirap district, Kamlesh Joshi on board went missing after taking off
from the district headquarters Khonsa on Tuesday. Joshi, a 2010 batch AGMUT
cadre IAS officer, joined as DC in this insurgency-infested district in June
2013. As this report is being written, as many as four choppers including two
from…
Indian Army, and one each from Indian Air Force and state government of
Arunachal Pradesh are engaged in the search operation in the dense forest of
the area bordering Myanmar.
Joshi, who was ranked 61 in civil services examination 2009
before opting for IAS, was the lone passenger in the helicopter. Earlier, Joshi
had served as the additional deputy commissioner at Namsai in Lohit district of
Arunachal Pradesh.
According to reports, there were two pilots in the chopper which
was on its way to Longding, a newly-created district of Arunachal Pradesh which
was earlier a part of Tirap district. Air Traffic Control lost touch with the
chopper at 11.15 am on Tuesday.
NSCN (Khaplang), the anti-peace talk Naga insurgency group
has a major stronghold in the area, but it is believed that the group has no
role with the missing chopper. For the record, Tirap district borders with
Myanmar, and Khaplang is a Naga who hails from Myanmar.
As officials on the
ground say, there was a bad weather condition on Tuesday forcing the chopper to disappear.
Only last month, Helicopter Association International (HAI)
conferred state-run Pawan Hans Ltd with Operator Safety Award for "outstanding
safety record".
It can be recalled that in April 2011, the then chief
minister of Arunachal Pradesh Dorjee Khandu died in a crash when he was
travelling in a Pawan Hans AS350 B-3 helicopter. The same month also witnessed
another crash that killed 19 people. In 2010, a Pawan Hans crew member fell to
his death at Namsai when he tried to close a door that had flung open during a
flight, according to a list of Pawan Hans accidents published in Wikipedia. In
September 2004, a Pawan Hans helicopter crashed near Shillong in Meghalaya that
killed the state’s then community and rural development minister Cyprian Sangma
and two MLAs and a former deputy speaker.
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