Hyderabad: The count of missing travellers from Telangana rose to 23 on Friday, even as two travellers with roots in the state — Ravinder Reddy Kumbham and Alli Ilesha — were confirmed safe, according to officials manning the Telangana Bhavan helpline in New Delhi. The latest addition to the missing persons’ list is 37-year-old Manikonda resident Dhanpal Reddy, whose family called the helpline on Friday evening after being unable to contact him for two days.According to officials, the missing list comprises people who travelled from Telangana as well as NRIs with roots in the state. They said the team is continuously coordinating with local authorities to track people from the state and ascertain how many were missing, stranded or in need of help, with damaged roads disrupting movement.“The number of those untraced from the state could still rise, with figures being revised through the day as and when we get inputs from local contacts. There is continuous coordination between Telangana Bhavan and the Secretariat control room too,” said an official, adding that the helpline has been inundated with frantic calls from worried friends and relatives seeking information about travellers whose whereabouts have been unknown since the calamity.Meanwhile, both travellers marked safe spoke to their families on Thursday, though their current locations remain unknown, their families said.Ravinder, who works in the US, had completed his Kailash Mansarovar Yatra and was travelling back through Tibet when the floods struck. “We received a call from him on Friday morning confirming that he is safe and travelling with his group by bus from Tibet to Nepal now. Ravinder said that the batch ahead of them, which had left a day earlier, bore the brunt of the floods. He and his group were supposed to be at the Gyirong Port immigration building the next day,” said Vijay Reddy, a family friend.“The roads connecting Nepal to India are very badly damaged. So, the group is now exploring ways to reach the airport in Kathmandu so that they can fly back to India. But even that is a treacherous stretch. Ravinder asked us not to worry, but it is tough to not be concerned,” he told TOI.Another traveller, Alli Ilesha, an LLB graduate and Mahabubnagar native, was also reported safe on Thursday evening, officials said. His family, however, said they have had only brief contact with him since then. A short WhatsApp call on Thursday evening, lasting barely a minute, was the last time they heard his voice.“He told us he was safe and that he’d walked close to 40 km since we’d last spoken,” his sister, Alli Vaaramma, said. They had video-called him on Aug 25, when he was about 20 km from Mount Kailash. Since then, they have been unable to reach him. “We sent him a message at 8am today (Friday), and it’s still not been delivered. All we want to know is when he’ll be back home,” she said.NRIs have become difficult to trace, officials sayTracking Telangana-origin NRIs stranded in the Nepal floods has proved more difficult than tracing state residents, officials manning the helpline said, as such travellers are treated as international passengers rather than residents of a particular state. Agencies such as the Isha Foundation are instead handling cases involving their members, they added.Even determining who qualifies as an NRI has proved complicated, with several cases falling between the two categories. “Some five or six people among them hold US passports, but they’ve actually left the US and are now living in Hyderabad. They travelled from here, not from abroad. That’s what makes their status confusing,” said an official coordinating with the helpline to trace those stranded.Helplines:Telangana Bhavan: 9871999044, 9949351270, 9618597969Secretariat Control Room: S Lakshminarayana: 9885371189, K Srinivas Reddy: 7997959754, E Chittibabu: 9440854433
