"Softly, Softly...": How Tunnelling Expert Arnold Dix Rescued 41 Workers

The professor played down his role in what is being hailed as India's largest such rescue, and told NDTV. "I am not the brains... am just a part... maybe one brain cell."

The "softly, softly" approach to drilling escape holes, and gauging the auger's impact on the already fragile and "still moving" mountainside, were key to freeing the 41 men trapped beneath the collapsed Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand, tunnelling expert Arnold Dix told NDTV Wednesday, hours after a precise 17-day rescue operation came to a successful conclusion.

Arnold Dix, a tunnelling expert and a professor of engineering, also told NDTV he was not surprised by 'rat hole' miners - practitioners of a mining process banned by the Supreme Court in 2014 for being unsafe and causing environmental pollution - being the key in the Uttarakhand tunnel rescue.

"My view was that we needed to go softly... I was confident nobody would be injured as long as we took our time and were careful. So we had to go 'softly, softly' and, in the end, we achieved our mission 100 mm at a time... digging by hand," Professor Dix explained, "This was important because we didn't want to disturb the mountain and cause another avalanche or disturbance."