All 22 bodies retrieved from Nepal plane crash
Agencies
KATHMANDU: Rescuers have recovered all 22 bodies from the site where a plane crashed on a mountainside in Nepal, the airline said on Tuesday.
All the bodies were flown to Kathmandu and taken to the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital where doctors are performing autopsies, Tara Air said in a statement. The bodies will be handed over to relatives once autopsy is done, it said.
While 10 bodies were flown to Kathmandu on Monday, the remaining were brought by army helicopter on Tuesday. Relatives of the crash victims waited outside the hospital building for authorities to release the bodies.
The Tara Air turboprop Twin Otter aircraft lost contact with the airport tower on Sunday while flying on a scheduled 20-minute flight in an area of deep river gorges and mountaintops.
Four Indians and two Germans were on the plane, Tara Air said. The three crew members and other passengers were Nepal nationals, it said. Local news reports said the passengers included two Nepalese families, one with four members and the other with seven.
The plane crashed on Sunday in Sanosware in Mustang district close to the mountain town of Jomsom, where it was heading after taking off from the resort town of Pokhara, 200km west of the capital Kathmandu.
The plane’s destination is popular with foreign hikers who trek on its mountain trails, and with Indian and Nepalese pilgrims who visit the revered Muktinath temple.
The Twin Otter, a rugged plane originally built by Canadian aircraft manufacturer De Havilland, has been in service in Nepal for about 50 years, during which it has been involved in about 21 accidents, according to
aviationnepal.com.
Voice recorder found
The search and rescue teams on Tuesday also found the flight’s voice recorder.
A spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) said the plane had only the voice recorder to preserve ground to air and air to air conversations. Modern planes have two such - a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder.
“Nothing except the wreckage is left at the crash site now,” Deo Chandra Lal Karna told Reuters. “All the bodies and the black box have been recovered.” the K-shaped nature of the economic recovery and the squeeze on purchasing power due to high inflation are to blame for this moderation in growth in the quarter, experts said.
“The latest GDP growth number only confirms the criticality of the growth challenge once the favourable base effect dissipates,” said Himanshu, an associate professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “The inflationary squeeze on mass demand is only going to make things worse and fiscal policy must do all it can to protect the poor from the pain of inflation.”
GDP growth for the four quarters ended March 2022 were 20.1%, 8.4%, 5.4% and 4.1%, respectively. The corresponding numbers for 2020-21 were minus 23.8%, minus 6.6%, 0.7% and 2.5%.
Both retail and wholesale inflation have been increasing at a fast rate, with the benchmark inflation measure of Consumer
GDP GROWS
Price Index reaching an eight year high of 7.95% in April. The government has announced a host of measures to control price rise and alleviate the pressure on household budgets. These include a reduction of excise duty on auto fuels, reduction of customs duty and imposition of export duties on a host of manufactured goods and export bans on important crops such as wheat and sugar.
“Silver linings are that India is better placed than many other nations and financial sector is in far better shape to support growth in this decade,” chief economic adviser V Anantha Nageswaran said, commenting on the GDP numbers.
Headwinds to growth are faced by all countries mainly because of global situation (the Ukraine war, supply chain disruptions and consequently rising commodity prices), Nageswaran said.
“There are multiple challenges. One is the tightening that is happening in the central banks in the developed world and other is the possibility of commodity prices going up even further,” he said. “But again, I repeat, it would be much harder for other countries than for India.”
He attributed his confidence to the huge food and fertiliser subsidies extended by the government to protect the poor and vulnerable.
The Indian economy consolidated its recovery in 2021-22, with most of its constituents surpassing pre-pandemic levels of activity, he said. The continued expansion of economic activity was evident in high frequency indicators in the first two months of the current financial year, Nageswaran added.
He, however, pointed to vulnerabilities such as high global prices of commodities with significant import dependency on crude, edible oil, fertilizer and metals. Balancing growth, inflation, fiscal and current deficits and the external value of the currency will be the continuing policy focus of the government, the economic advisor said.
Where the latest quarterly GDP numbers raise an alarm is on the unequal pain inflation seems to have inflicted in the Indian economy. This was best seen in the performance of the manufacturing sector. Despite a robust performance of high frequency indicators such as the purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing, its gross valueadded component actually saw an annual contraction of 0.2% in the March quarter.
This, when read with anecdotal accounts of larger firms gaining in terms of market share and pricing power at the cost of smaller firms, seems to suggest that the K-shaped nature of the recovery is continuing in the economy and employment intensive firms might still be suffering.
GDP numbers are not the only statistic that suggests the Indian economy might be undergoing a sequential moderation. While the index of eight core sector industries recorded an annual growth of 8.4% in April, in absolute terms the April reading (143.2) was l ower than the March number (158.2).
Rising inflation and decelerating growth is likely to complicate policymaking choices on both the fiscal and monetary policy fronts. Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das has already said that the monetary policy committee raising interest rates on June 8, which is when its next meeting will culminate, was a given.
“Peak impact of interest rate hikes on GDP will be felt only towards the end of this fiscal year,” Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at ratings firm Crisil, said in a statement.
“I see support to growth from a strong bounceback in contactbased services, which last fiscal was about 11.3% lower than fiscal 2020 levels,” Joshi said. “But headwinds from slower global growth and higher oil prices have tilted the risks — to our forecast of 7.3% for the current fiscal – downwards.”