  Effective field theory techniques provide us important tools to probe for
physics beyond the Standard Model in a relatively model-independent way. In
this work, we revisit the CP-even dimension-6 purely gluonic operator to
investigate the possible constraints on it by studying its effect on top-pair
production at the LHC, in particular the high $p_T$ and $m_{t\bar{t}}$ tails of
the distribution. Cut-based analysis reveals that the scale of New Physics when
this operator alone contributes to the production process is greater than 3.4
TeV at 95% C.L., which is a much stronger bound compared to the bound of 850
GeV obtained from Run-I data using the same channel. This is reinforced by an
analysis using Machine Learning techniques. Our study complements similar
studies that have focussed on other collider channels to study this operator.
