Uttarakhand tunnel rescue, race to save 40 trapped workers
BBC :
Rescue operations to save 40 workers trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand have been ongoing since Sunday morning.
Forty workers, who were building the Silkyara tunnel, were trapped when part of it caved in due to a landslide nearby on Sunday.
The landslide caused heavy debris to fall on the tunnel, leading to its collapse. The mounds of debris cut off oxygen supply to the workers.
Officials said the men were trapped some 200m into the tunnel but none of them were injured.
As of Friday afternoon, rescue workers had dug through 24m of the 60m debris needed to lay a pipe that would help the trapped men crawl out of the tunnel.
“If the work continues at this rate, it will take another 40-48 hours to rescue the workers,” Col Deepak Patil, official in charge of rescue operations, said on Friday.
The tunnel in Uttarkashi district is part of the federal government’s ambitious $1.5bn (£1.2bn) highway project to improve connectivity to famous pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand. The mountainous state, where several Himalayan peaks and glaciers are located, is home to some of the holiest sites for Hindus.
This 4.5km (2.7 miles) tunnel is meant to provide all weather connectivity to Yamunotri, one of the four most revered Hindu pilgrimages site in the Himalayas. It is expected to reduce travel distance between Uttarkashi and Yamunotri town by 26km (16 miles).
Thousands of devotees flock to the temple at Yamunotri every year as it is the starting point for the Himalayan Char Dham Yatra pilgrimage, which goes through Gangotri and Kedarnath before culminating in the temple town of Badrinath.
Construction of the tunnel was approved by the federal government in 2018.
Environment experts have criticised its construction despite the fragile ecology of the region. “When you are aligning a tunnel in an area that is very close to the highly fragile Himalayas, the authorities should have conducted some geological investigation,” Navin Juyal, a geologist, told The Hindu. “Then the fragility of this place should have been brought to the notice of the authorities.”
Most of the workers trapped in the tunnel are migrant labourers from states in northern and eastern India.
Among the 40 workers, officials report that 15 are from Jharkhand, eight from Uttar Pradesh, five from Odisha, four from Bihar, three from Bengal, and two each from Assam and Uttarakhand, with one from Himachal Pradesh.
The Jharkhand government has sent a three-member team to aid rescue workers.
Sharman Batra, 21, is one of the few workers who noticed the debris beginning to fall from the ceiling of the tunnel on Sunday morning.
He and some other workers – Anand Tudu, 24, Santosh Pandit, 40 and Pem Yadav, 29 – were able to escape before a part of the tunnel collapsed, cutting them off from the 40 men trapped inside.