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.
In the Himalaya, says Brar, the area to be covered is vast and climbers are few and far between, so it is not possible to have rescue teams on standby in each valley. Cumbersome regulations and lack of equipment make communication very difficult, and training is negligible. Additionally, it can take up to a week to get a helicopter rescue organised, at prohibitive cost. When an accident occurs, the most critical period is the 24 to 48 hours following, so that by the lime a helicopter arrives, most people actually requiring rescue are already beyond help.
Low tech rescue