Mountain Rescue The Right Way

Mountain rescue techniques in the Himalaya have been fashioned after rescue systems in the Alps and the American Rockies. The tendency has been to concentrate on sophisticated helicopter based rescue systems whose focus is on evacuation of the dead or wounded at high cost. This often restricts rescue to fully insured Western climbers. Little time has been spent on studying alternative rescue systems tailored to Himalayan conditions, that is, until Indian climbing enthusiasts — Parmindar Brar, Mandip Singh Soin and Dr. Ranganath Pathak — decided to do something about it.

Brar is an officer at the Ministry for Energy, Soin runs a trek agency, and Dr. Pathak serves at Safdarjang Hospital — all are from Delhi. As climbing partners in the Western Indian Himalaya, they noticed the utter lack of mountain rescue facilities and as a small effort they set up the Himalayan Evacuation and Life saving Project (HELP), with seed money from the London-based lnlaks Foundation. Edmund Hillary, Everesteer and New Zealand´s High Commissioner to India, serves as HELP´s patron. As Brar, HELP´S President, explains it, transplanting Western rescue systems to the Himalaya simply will not be very effective. In the French Alps, for example, helicopter and rescue crews are on constant standby, the climbing area is small and well mapped, radio communications are ubiquitous, rescuers are well trained, and hospitals are only minutes away by chopper.