New Delhi, Jul 20 : The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) will soon press into service its first contingent of cadaver dogs who can sniff out the dead or human remains in a disaster zone, an officer at the agency said.
About half a dozen such dogs have been under training at the NDRF battalion bases in Arakkonam in Tamil Nadu and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh for the last few months, they said.
To train the special canines, largely from the Belgian Malinois and Labrador breeds, the force has procured a special scent from abroad that smells akin to the odour emitted by a dead body, he said.
“For all these years, the NDRF focused on its mandate of saving lives. Utilising the golden hour of finding life during a disaster has been the guiding principle of the rescuers, and hence finding the dead or mortal remains was not a priority,” an NDRF officer told PTI.
However, we have seen that the force is also part of operations where NDRF is tasked with retrieving bodies from under the debris, like in the aftermath of a landslide or train or road accident, he said.
Finding bodies or human remains is important to give closure to the families and loved ones, he said.
Hence, the NDRF, a few months back, embarked on its maiden exercise to train cadaver dogs, the officer said.
Another officer said there are hardly any such dogs in the state rescue forces in India, and those who have them, have had a mixed success rate.
Their success depends on a lot of factors, including prevailing weather conditions, humidity, snow and the presence of other strong odours in the area of operation. Detection of the dead is harder than the alive, he said.
“Training such dogs is a challenge as it requires a human body or body parts that are not easily available. Hence, a special scent that smells like dead human remains was procured for training the NDRF dogs from abroad,” the officer said.
The dogs are expected to complete their training by the next month. After that, they will be placed with some specific NDRF battalions out of the total 16 spread across the country, he said.
Once deployed, we will get to know about the success rate of such dogs, the officer earlier quoted said.
Two cadaver dogs of the Kerala Police were deployed earlier this year in the aftermath of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (SLBC) tunnel collapse in Telangana, leading to the trapping of eight people. The same dogs were also used during the 2024 Wayanad landslides.
The NDRF was raised in 2006, and at present, it has a strength of about 18,000 men and women rescuers spread across over 30 regional response centres. (PTI)
