The rescue operation being undertaken at the Tapovan power tunnel in Uttarakhand is being led by the first woman ITBP officer to successfully scale the South Pole, and some other ace mountain-warfare trained officers of the border guarding force who have seen disasters in the hills up close.
Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Aparna Kumar, a 2002-batch Indian Police Service officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, is the senior-most field officer of the force on the ground.
Kumar, 45, who is the sector in-charge of the ITBP northern frontier based in Uttarakhand's capital- Dehradun, is well known as the first woman IPS and ITBP officer to successfully conquer the South Pole, the southernmost point on the globe situated in Antarctica, in 2019.
The officer, who has two young children and hails from Karnataka, joined the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) in 2018 on deputation.
She told PTI on phone from Joshimath that the “operation of clearing the slush in the Tapovan tunnel is continuing”.
“It is a tough task but we are on it,” Kumar said.
She had told reporters in 2019 that her first brush with mountaineering happened when she was commanding a Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) battalion in Uttar Pradesh some years ago.
“I did my advanced mountaineering course in July, 2014 and since then there has been no looking back,” Kumar had said.
She has also completed the prestigious seven summits' challenge by scaling all the seven top peaks of the seven…
