The Better India · 4 hours ago

How Tiranga Mountain Rescue Is Saving Indian Soldiers

When climber Hemant Sachdev fell into a crevasse on Everest in 2013 and a skilled friend pulled him to safety, the experience lodged something in him that survival alone couldn't answer. Watching nine soldiers die in a Siachen avalanche three years later - buried for five days without the specialized help that had saved him - he found himself asking why men who faced the mountains out of duty were left with less than those who faced them out of passion. That question became Tiranga Mountain Rescue, India's first professional avalanche and mountain rescue organization, which has since trained over 20,000 Army personnel and helped bring approximately 400 soldiers home. "If you don't have a great structure or a good sense of very skilled people to provide you safety," Sachdev reflects, "then you can never really achieve great heights." What this story quietly insists is that gratitude, when it is honest and wide enough, doesn't stay private - it finds its way back into the world as something others can lean on.