Under a flyover on the Ahmedabad-Dholka Road in the city, a family desperately waits for any news of their daughter, who has been missing for several days after she allegedly fell into an open drain. All that the parents can do is get their hopes up every time fire and sanitation personnel go inside in search of their 10-year-old Manisha Salat.However, the rescue personnel have not had much luck. Manisha, who is said to be visually impaired, has remained untraceable since October 10.Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has stationed a fire truck at the site. Its personnel go down the sewer to look for Manisha wearing safety gear. A kilometre away, a team of municipal staff scan a pit of chemical sludge.For the last seven days, Paruben Salat, her husband Bhalabhai and their two sons aged five and seven years have been camping under the bridge, watching the drill of the rescue teams. The family lives in a shanty a kilometer away.“Give me my daughter back, dead or alive,” cries Paruben, a daily wage worker. Her family had gotten off an autorickshaw after returning from a chore when Manisha started walking away even as her mother was busy settling the fare. “Ma, I am falling”, Paru remembers her daughter screaming as she disappeared into the 40 feet deep pit.“Even if it is just bones, find her,” she says repeatedly, adding how her sons too “cannot see after dark”. Manisha was suspected to be suffering from night blindness, like her brothers.“We removed the grass that had grown over the drain opening camouflaging it. We tried to find our daughter through pipes and sticks but could see nothing as it was full of sludge and water. I appealed to my family to let me go inside and search for her, but they stopped me saying there were poisonous chemicals and gas inside. They said let the rescue teams arrive,” Paruben says.According to Paruben, the incident happened around 3 pm; an Ahmedabad Fire and Emergency Services team arrived around 4 pm. Since then, round-the-clock search operations have yielded no trace of the child.Story continues below this adAfter directions of AMC Standing Committee Chairman Kamlesh Patel to use CCTV and borewell cameras along the nearly one-km stretch till a pumping station and the Sabarmati bank, where the sewer pipeline drains, the rescue teams carried out a search till Thursday night.While fire department teams continue their search through the underground drainage network using cameras, heavy desilting machines have been deployed to clear the passage for the search teams. An ongoing road construction work has complicated the rescue with loose earth leading to the silting of the lines.“Necessary instructions have been passed on to the relevant departments to ensure that there is no delay in the search for the girl,” Patel said.The challenge is the depth of the sewer and the heavy flow of hazardous industrial waste that emits poisonous gases like methane. The site is close to the Naroda and Narol industrial cluster and the city’s waste dumping site of Pirana.“We’ve been working in eight-hour shifts round-the-clock since October 10, but couldn’t trace her. Teams have conducted searches with the help of CCTV cameras at the manhole-end, as well as those at the Sabarmati Riverbank-end and the pumping station. The main trunk line, which is around 20 km long, receives sludge water from Naroda and the city’s North, South, and East zones. Due to heavy water flow in the daytime, search operations are not easy. So, our search operation is aggressive at night,” Pritesh Gadhvi, Station Fire Officer of Jamalpur Fire Station who is supervising the search operations, tells The Indian Express on Friday.Story continues below this adThe search teams are sent into the drainage with the SCABA (self-contained breathing apparatus), oxygen cylinders and masks, he says.AMC engineers say the toxic chemical effluent mixing into the municipal sewage stream poses health and safety risks.