From Everest Crevasse to Siachen: How Hemant Sachdev Built Tiranga Mountain Rescue

In May 2013, mountaineer Hemant Sachdev was dangling over an abyss on Mount Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, held by a single rope, when a fellow climber — an experienced rescuer who had lost sight of him for over a minute — turned back and pulled him to safety. The four-member team went on to summit Everest, but the memory of that near-death moment stayed with Sachdev.

Two years later, a news report about soldiers buried under an avalanche at Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield, brought it all back. ‘I kept thinking to myself that if I could be rescued in a place like Mount Everest, why can’t these soldiers be?’ Sachdev recalls. He saw a clear distinction between the two: ‘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.’

His idea for a civilian mountain rescue foundation to support the Indian Army was initially dismissed — after all, wasn’t rescue the Army’s own job? But the concept eventually took shape as Tiranga Mountain Rescue, founded in 2016. A decade on, it operates 16 teams and 48 full-time professional rescuers across India’s most sensitive mountain postings, including Siachen, Kargil, Tawang and Gurez.

The impact has been dramatic: soldier deaths from non-combat causes like avalanches, landslides and ailments — historically running at 40-50 a year, more than combat losses — have fallen to zero over the last three years. Much of that comes from prevention rather than rescue alone; last season, the foundation visited more than 400 posts to assess routes, weather patterns and disaster risks and to train soldiers directly.

Tiranga’s rescues have included a 2022 operation in Tawang, where seven avalanche-buried soldiers were found within hours of the team’s helicopter landing after two days of unsuccessful searching, and a March 2026 response to an avalanche at Zoji La Pass that trapped 12 civilians. The organisation has also taken part in the 2024 Wayanad landslide response and the 2021 Uttarakhand glacier burst. As Sachdev puts it: ‘The most dangerous place in the mountains is only as dangerous as your ability to rescue.’