The bad news is that forty workers remain trapped since Sunday due to the collapse of the tunnel they were building in the Indian Himalayas. The good news is that everyone is alive and the rescue teams say they have the necessary machinery to evacuate them as of Tuesday.
The morale of the former has increased by learning, via walkie-talkie, that although thirty or forty meters of rubble still separate them from the excavators, a 76 centimeter diameter steel tube is currently being introduced, to try to can escape through it within twenty-four hours.
Meanwhile, the water supply pipeline at the works is being used to deliver them, in addition to fluid, oxygen and packets of nuts. "All the workers are alive," said Karamvir Singh Bhandari, commander of the National Emergency Response Force.
Due to structural or natural causes - the police say they still do not have an explanation - the tunnel collapsed in several sections over two kilometers last Sunday, trapping most of the workers about two hundred meters from the exit. In fact, the incident occurred during the shift change, which allowed more than a dozen workers - those who were closest to the entrance - to have just enough time to get outside.
From the first day, about sixty workers with excavators removed twenty meters of rubble. Realizing that they could have 40 more meters ahead, plan B, drilling and introducing the steel tube, was activated.
Eighty police officers and twenty firefighters have also traveled to the scene, along with several ambulances and medical personnel, in an improvised field hospital.
The damaged works are part of the new 889-kilometer dual carriageway mountain road with which Narendra Modi's government wants to connect the four temples that make up the Chota Char Dham or "small pilgrimage" in northern India.
Although the promotion of religious tourism fits perfectly with the nature of Narendra Modi's BJP, the road improvement in the Himalayas is also a response to even greater infrastructure improvements on the other side of the line of control. This is not exactly an international border, since China and India have different perceptions of where it should run.
In this sense, in 2021, the Indian Supreme Court recognized that the route had not had an appropriate environmental impact study, but congratulated itself because its road width would be "beneficial for the defense of India's borders."
The tunnel, whose work began in 2018, should have been completed two summers ago, but the pandemic prevented it. The new reference date is May next year, coinciding with the Indian elections.
The Chota Char Dham route or small route of the four residences of deities is one of the projects most cherished by Prime Minister Modi, who spent some of the most secretive years of his biography, in his early youth, wandering through the Himalayas moved by his Hindu devotion. To make things easier, the route plans to link the four Himalayan temples mentioned with a two-lane road (pompously called a "highway"). Its budget, 1,400 million euros.
The incident took place in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, which borders China and which, within the so-called Special Frontier Force, hosts a few thousand ethnic Tibetan soldiers, children and grandchildren of those who crossed into India at the end of the fifty with the Dalai Lama.
It should be said that the small states of Uttarakhand and Himachal are the only ones in India where the upper castes are numerically in the majority. Undeclared, that was the main reason for separating them, respectively, from Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Their demographics help explain why the trapped workers are all, except one, emigrants from other poorer Indian states, such as Bihar or West Bengal.
Last January, more than two hundred people died in floods in Uttarakhand. Although much worse was ten years ago, when a sudden thaw caused 5,700 deaths in the area, with the Kedarnath temple - at 3,580 meters of altitude and which is only open six months a year - as the epicenter.
This temple, together with that of Gangotri - at the sources of the Ganges - that of Yamnotri - at the sources of the Yamuna and that of Badrinath - the most important - makes up the aforementioned Hindu circuit, known as Choti (small) Char Dham, circumscribed to the north from India.
Badrinath is also the northern vertex of the Char Dham, the great pan-Indian circuit, whose other cardinal points are the temples of Puri - to the east - Rameswaram - to the south - and Dwarka to the west. The collapse of bridges, tunnels and other structures killed 1,630 Indians in 2021, according to an official report.
The head of government of Uttarakhand, from the same party as Modi, Pushkar Singh Dhami, visited the blocked entrance to the tunnel on Monday. Singh Dhami replaced his co-religionist Tirath Singh Rawat in 2021, who became famous by saying that Modi would eventually be worshiped as the gods Shiva and Vishnu, before falling into disgrace for insisting on celebrating the Kumbh Mela mega pilgrimage (a year before than expected, on the advice of astrologers) at the beginning of the Covid-21 epidemic, which led to the spread of thousands of infections throughout the country, with catastrophic consequences.
