Modi's Himalayan miracle!

On the evening of Friday, June 21, as India reeled from the shock of the calamity in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi landed up in Dehradun with a handful of officers. By Sunday, it was claimed that he had rescued 15,000 stranded Gujaratis from the wreckage of Uttarakhand and sent these grateful folks back home.
This miracle was played up in media. But how was this feat achieved in a day or so, when India's entire military establishment has struggled to rescue around 40,000 people over 10 days?
Reports say that Modi pulled off this coup with a fleet of 80 Innovas. How did these cars manage to reach places like Kedarnath, across roads that have been washed away, over landslides that have wrecked most access routes?
But let us assume Modi's Innovas had wings as well as helicopter rotors. Including the driver, an Innova is designed to carry seven people. In a tough situation, assume you could pack nine passengers into each car. In that case, a convoy of 80 Innovas could ferry 720 people down the mountains to Dehradun at one go. To get 15,000 people down, the convoy would need to make 21 round trips.
The distance between Dehradun and Kedarnath is 221 km. So 21 trips up and down would mean that each Innova would have to travel nearly 9,300 km.
It takes longer to travel in the hills than in the plains. So, assuming an average speed of 40 km per hour, it would take 233 hours of driving to pull off the feat.
Actually, in less than a day: a breathless media reported that by Saturday, 25 luxury buses had brought a group of Gujaratis back to Delhi.
Modi, ever modest, himself did not make the claim. It was likely dumped on a gullible media by his public relations agency, an American outfit called Apco Worldwide. In 2007, Apco was hired, ostensibly to boost the Vibrant Gujarat summits, but to actually burnish Modi's image, for $25,000 a month.
Meanwhile, India's air force chief said all 20 people on board of a military helicopter were killed when it crashed in flood devastated northern Indian on Tuesday.
The helicopter carrying soldiers, police and rescue workers crashed on Tuesday afternoon during a rescue mission in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand where flash floods and landslides have killed some 1,000 people.