The Mountaineer Who Built India’s Mountain Rescue Service, Zero Deaths in Three Years

When mountaineer Hemant Sachdev fell into a crevasse on Mount Everest’s Khumbu Icefall in May 2013, dangling over the abyss on a single rope, he didn’t just escape with his life — he came back with a mission. ‘In that moment, my entire life flashed before my eyes,’ he says. ‘All I could see was blood.’ A fellow climber, an experienced rescuer, pulled him out with swift precision, and the four-member team went on to summit Everest.

Two years later, a news bulletin about soldiers buried under an avalanche at Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield, revived the memory of his own rescue. ‘I kept thinking to myself that if I could be rescued in a place like Mount Everest, why can’t these soldiers be?’ he says. ‘Climbers go for their sense of pleasure, their own achievement. It’s narcissistic, in some sense. But the soldiers are doing it out of a sense of duty.’

Sachdev’s proposal for a civilian mountain rescue foundation to support the Indian Army was initially met with disbelief. It eventually became Tiranga Mountain Rescue, founded in 2016. A decade later, the non-profit runs 16 teams across the country’s most sensitive mountain postings — from Siachen to Kargil, Tawang to Gurez — with 48 full-time professional rescuers.

The results speak for themselves. ‘Earlier, there used to be an average of 40-50 deaths a year,’ Sachdev says, noting that the defence forces lose more soldiers to non-combat causes like avalanches, landslides and ailments than to combat itself. ‘In the last three years, casualties have come down to zero.’ Beyond active rescues, the foundation does extensive preventive work — last season, it visited over 400 posts to analyse routes, weather patterns and disaster risks, and to train soldiers.

When rescues do happen, they’re often a race against the clock. In a 2022 incident in Tawang, seven soldiers buried by an avalanche couldn’t be located after two full days of searching; Tiranga’s team was helicoptered in and found them within hours. In March this year, the team also responded to an avalanche at Zoji La Pass that trapped 12 civilians in vehicles, after seven others nearby had already died. Tiranga has since taken part in rescue efforts for the 2024 Wayanad landslide and the 2021 Uttarakhand glacier burst. ‘The most dangerous place in the mountains,’ Sachdev says, ‘is only as dangerous as your ability to rescue.’