Dehradun, July 23 -- The state government is likely to send multiple teams to the Kedarnath region once again this year in search of skeletal remains of victims from the 2013 flood tragedy - despite years of similar operations yielding no results, according to an official familiar with the matter. Vinod Kumar Suman, secretary of disaster management, said, "We sent teams last year for the search of skeletal remains of the Kedarnath victims but didn't find any. We will submit the report of that in the high court for compliance of its directives and if necessary, we will send teams this year as well." Sub-Inspector Rajwar Singh Rana, who was part of one such search team in 2024, said, "I, along with my team, searched for traces of human remains from Kedarnath to Vasuki Tal, but to no avail." The last time any remains were recovered was in September 2020, when four skeletons were found during a search operation between Garud Chatti and Gau Mukh. Since the devastating flash floods and landslides in June 2013, a total of 703 bodies or skeletal remains have been recovered from the region - including 545 in 2013, 63 in 2014, three in 2015, 60 in 2016, seven in 2017, and 21 in 2018. In November 2024, 10 teams - comprising experts from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, the police, State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), Geological Survey of India (GSI), and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) - were deployed across different routes in the Kedarnath region on November 11, equipped with necessary gear. The teams scoured their respective routes for three days but failed to locate any human remains. According to experts involved in the search, the possibility of recovering more remains is extremely slim. Anil Kumar, a scientist at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, said, "We explored the possibility of using ground penetrating radar (GPR) in the Kedarnath valley to search for skeletal remains from the 2013 tragedy. But the problem is that the riverbed is filled with large boulders. There is no flat land where GPR can be used easily. In our report, we concluded that it is not feasible to deploy GPR in the valley." "Last year too, we conducted multiple transects in an attempt to locate human remains. We examined the area from every possible angle, geophysical, glaciological, but the possibility of finding them is almost nil," he added. "We try to conclude our search each year by stating that all possible avenues to locate human remains have been explored, but we have to comply with directives from the government or the court." Delhi-based activist Ajay Gautam, who has been pursuing the matter for over a decade, said, "I filed two PILs in the High Court on this matter - one in 2014 and another in 2019. The last time bodies were retrieved was in 2020. The government had constituted a multi-institutional committee, but later threw up its hands, saying they had tried everything and could no longer find any human remains. My PIL was disposed of in 2020 with certain directions." He added, "It is a matter of concern that people go missing every year in disaster-related incidents, yet the government fails to trace them. There should be a dedicated policy to address this." In November 2016, the HC had directed the state government to form special investigation teams (SITs) to trace and cremate the bodies of the 2013 disaster victims. Following the directions, the state government in May 2017 had constituted five SITs for searching the bodies of the victims. On September 4, 2019, Uttarakhand government filed an affidavit in the high court, stating that excavating the fragile Himalayan terrai, to trace the bodies of 3,075 people still missing in the 2013 tragedy, could cause "irreparable damage to the ecology and the environment"....