still intact [@eldridge04]. Of special interest are the Type II plateau SNe which are characterized by a ‘plateau’ in their optical light curve and are more common, constituting about 75% of all Type II SNe [@smith10]. The IIP SNe show a wide range of plateau luminosities, plateau durations, expansion velocities and nickel masses [@hamuy03] and these observational properties are connected with the explosion mechanism as well as the physical properties of the progenitor star such as ejected mass, explosion energy and pre-SN radius [@nadyozhin03; @smartt09]. The IIP SNe are thought to result from progenitor masses in the range $8-25$ [@heger03] with an extended hydrogen envelope necessary to maintain the plateau phase. A detailed study of optical light curves and spectra of only a few nearby IIP SNe has been done so far and there exists a discrepancy in estimating the mass of their progenitors, e.g, for the three well studied events (namely 1999em, 2005cs and 2004et), the determination of progenitor mass from the hydrodynamical modeling of their light curve is found to be higher than that estimated from pre-SN imaging [@utrobin10; @bersten11].

Recently, a number of ‘low luminosity’ Type IIP events have been discovered viz. SNe 1999br, 1999eu, 1994N, 2001dc, 