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Civilian saves ITBP trooper, loses seven fingers in the process

On the night of May 19, Dipankar started ascending towards the Dhaulagiri summit, which is the seventh highest mountain in the world.

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We have often heard stories of those who don the uniform helping those in need. But in a touching turnaround, a civilian  mountaineer Dipankar Ghosh put his own life at risk to save an Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) trooper Biman Biswas on a recent mountaineering expedition to Dhaulagiri summit. However, in doing so, he lost seven of his fingers to frostbite. The man he saved, Biswas, is now recuperating in AIIMS.

Ghosh, a well renowned mountaineer with 45 mountain expeditions in his name, had left alone for the Dhaulagiri expedition in April. He had been camping in the basecamp with his Sherpa a little away from the ITBP Himveer camps for a month. Himveer are considered to be one of the finest mountain warforce personnel in the world.    

On the night of May 19, Dipankar started ascending towards the Dhaulagiri summit, which is the seventh highest mountain in the world. At around 4:12 pm the next day, he reached the summit but could not see any of the Himveers who had also started towards the summit an hour before him.

“Despite the bad weather and severe conditions, I saw a few foreigner mountaineers at the summit, but none of the ITBP men I had been interacting with the last one month,” said Ghosh, who runs a family business in Kolkata. “I got a little worried for them and started descending after spending 25 minutes at the summit, while thinking about them all the while,” he added.

Around 6 pm on May 20, Dipankar found Biswas, a constable in the ITBP Himveer, sitting in the snow. Biswas had got separated from his contingent just 200 meters below the summit and had got snow blindness and showed signs of acute mountain sickness 

“I realized that he was hallucinating when he asked me for a camp as he wanted to rest and also told me that he could not see anything,” says Ghosh. “I stayed back to help him as I did not want to leave a man, who could not see at that height alone. My sherpa left us there, as weather was turning bad, leaving two of us alone,” he added.

It took Biman and Ghosh over 23 hours to reach the safety of the summit camp which, if Ghosh had done alone, would have taken him only 4-5 hours. Biman, who was still hallucinating, could not see and this made their descend slower.

“Ghosh saved my life on that mountain. I had been alone sitting there and now when I look back, it tears me up. He stopped to save me,” says Biman Biswas. “After reaching summit camp, I was airlifted by our rescuers and upon reaching the base, I requested my seniors to send some help for Ghosh who was still at Basecamp 2,” he added.

“I risked my life for Biman, who I had made friends with at this expedition, and I was now left all alone in Kathmandu with no help,” says Ghosh. 

While Biman Biswas was brought to AIIMS and has been undergoing treatment since then; Ghosh stayed stuck in Kathmandu for the next few days due to the unavailability of flights. During this time, his fingers got worse and by the time he reached Kolkata on May 28, his seven frostbitten fingers, due to taking off gloves to help Biman, had turned completely black and now some parts will have to be amputated.

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