A catastrophic overnight collapse at an under-construction hydropower tunnel in India’s northern Himalayan state of Uttarakhand has left at least seven workers dead, with three more still unaccounted for, local officials confirmed in a press briefing Friday.
The incident unfolded late Thursday at the Vishnugad-Pipalkoti hydroelectric project located in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. A sudden surge of water mixed with rocky debris breached the unfinished tunnel, trapping construction crews who were on-site when the collapse occurred, according to Gaurav Kumar, the top district administrative officer. Immediately following the disaster, a large-scale multi-agency rescue mission was deployed to reach trapped workers and clear the blocked passage.
State Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami confirmed that out of the 22 workers who were inside the tunnel when the accident happened, 12 have been pulled out alive, with seven confirmed dead and three remaining missing as of Friday.
Rescue teams drawn from the National Disaster Response Force, state Disaster Response Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, and local fire services are currently working against hazardous conditions to locate the three missing workers. Amrit Lal Meena, commander of the NDRF team deployed to the site, described the challenging operational environment. “When our team first arrived and launched operations, the tunnel was already flooded, with water actively seeping through the rock walls,” Meena explained. “Since we started, water levels have risen substantially, which is slowing our progress significantly.”
The collapse shines a renewed spotlight on the persistent safety crisis plaguing India’s booming infrastructure sector. Fatal construction accidents are far too common across the country, as rapid development of large-scale projects often clashes with unstable geological formations, inconsistent construction oversight, extreme weather patterns, and lax enforcement of workplace safety standards.
This risk is amplified exponentially in India’s Himalayan region, where naturally fragile mountain formations, frequent seismic activity, and unpredictable underground geological conditions make large tunneling projects inherently dangerous. The latest disaster is just one in a string of fatal infrastructure accidents in the country in recent years. In February 2024, an explosion at an underground coal mine in the northeastern state of Meghalaya claimed the lives of at least 18 workers. In 2023, another major tunnel collapse in Uttarakhand trapped 41 construction workers for 17 days before a dramatic, high-profile rescue operation successfully extracted all of them alive.