Tiranga Mountain Rescue: 48 Rescuers, 16 Teams, Zero Soldier Deaths in Three Years

Tiranga Mountain Rescue, a decade-old civilian non-profit, now operates 16 teams and 48 full-time professional rescuers across India’s most sensitive high-altitude military postings — Siachen, Kargil, Tawang and Gurez — and has brought soldier deaths from non-combat causes down to zero over the past three years.

The organisation traces back to a single moment in May 2013, when its founder, mountaineer Hemant Sachdev, fell into a crevasse on Mount Everest’s Khumbu Icefall and was pulled to safety by a fellow climber after being spotted missing for over a minute. Two years later, news of soldiers buried under an avalanche at Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield, made him wonder why the same kind of rescue that saved him on Everest couldn’t reach soldiers doing their duty in similarly extreme conditions.

‘Earlier, there used to be an average of 40-50 deaths a year,’ Sachdev says, pointing out that non-combat causes like avalanches, landslides and ailments have historically claimed more soldiers than combat itself. ‘In the last three years, casualties have come down to zero.’ The foundation’s work goes well beyond emergency response — last season alone, teams visited over 400 posts to study routes, weather patterns and disaster risks, and to train soldiers on the ground.

Tiranga’s rescue operations have included a 2022 mission in Tawang, where a helicopter dropped the team at the site of an avalanche that had buried seven soldiers for two days; they located the bodies within hours of landing. In March this year, the team also responded to an avalanche at Zoji La Pass, mobilising despite dehydration, cold and difficult weather to reach 12 civilians trapped in vehicles after seven others nearby had already died.

The organisation has since been involved in the 2024 Wayanad landslide response and the 2021 Uttarakhand glacier burst. Sachdev’s founding proposal to the Indian Army was initially met with scepticism, but the results — zero deaths across three years of deployment — have made the case for themselves.