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The death toll from a methane explosion inside a hydropower tunnel in the Indian Himalayas jumped to 20 even as five workers remained trapped two days after the collapse.
The toll was updated after rescue crews recovered more bodies from the under-construction tunnel at Samardung-Jholungey, in Namchi district of Sikkim state, where 27 men were working when the blast struck on Monday afternoon.
Since two workers had escaped in the moments after the explosion, the state's chief minister Prem Singh Tamang said, five remained unaccounted for.
Sikkim is a small, mountainous state in India's northeast bordering Nepal, Bhutan and China.
The collapsed tunnel forms part of the Teesta Stage VI hydroelectric project run by the state-owned National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.
The company said a suspected burst of methane trapped within the rock strata caused the explosion, releasing fumes and toxic gases, and that emergency protocols were immediately activated.
Gas building up naturally in the rock is a principal hazard of tunnelling since methane is odourless, displaces oxygen and ignites readily.
Authorities said high methane concentration inside the tunnel continued to obstruct the search and rescue teams had been using breathing apparatus after detecting toxic levels of the gas.
Most of the dead were migrant labourers from outside Sikkim. It’s common for large infrastructure projects to hire workers from poorer states in northern and eastern India.
Of the 13 victims identified so far, nine came from Jalpaiguri and two from Alipurduar, both in West Bengal, and one each from Punjab and Sikkim.
Mr Tamang said a special investigation team would be set up to establish what caused the explosion. He described it as India’s worst incident of its kind since a road tunnel collapsed at Silkyara in the northern state of Uttarakhand in November 2023, trapping 41 men for 17 days before all were pulled out alive.
The state government announced a compensation of Rs 400,000 (£3,460) for each victim’s kin while prime minister Narendra Modi announced a further Rs 200,000 (£1,730) for each bereaved family as well as Rs 50,000 (£430) for each of the injured.
Mr Modi said in a post on X that he was pained by the deaths and wished the injured a quick recovery.
"I extend my deepest condolences to the bereaved families,” he said. “I pray that those injured recover at the earliest.”
Police in Jalpaiguri said they were arranging transport for relatives of the dead workers to reach the site.
The Teesta project is one of a chain of hydropower installations along the river of the same name, which runs from the high Himalayas through Sikkim and into West Bengal. Such projects are central to India's drive to expand renewable electricity, but the geology of the region is unstable and prone to landslides and earthquakes, making construction dangerous.
In October 2023, a glacial lake burst high in the mountains and sent a torrent of water down the Teesta, destroying a dam at Chungthang and killing at least 40 people.
Scientists warn that as the climate warms and the Himalayan glaciers retreat, the risks of building at scale on these slopes are increasing.
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