“I Just Kept Digging” — How a 20-Year-Old Woman Survived the Unthinkable in Himachal’s Landslide Horror
By Staff Reporter | Mandi, Himachal Pradesh
On most days, Sharan village in the Seraj Valley is quiet, its silence broken only by the whisper of pines and the occasional hum of mountain winds. But on the night of June 30, nature turned violent.
And in the middle of that chaos, 20-year-old Tuneja Thakur found herself buried alive.
The word "miracle" gets thrown around a lot, but in Tuneja’s case, it might actually fit. A sudden landslide triggered by torrential flash floods tore through her neighborhood near midnight. In the panic and the roar of the collapsing hillside, Tuneja stepped out to find safety. Instead, the mountain found her.
“It felt like the earth swallowed me,” she said, sitting with her family, still caked in traces of dried mud two days later. “One second I was running. The next, I couldn’t see anything but black.”
She wasn’t screaming. She couldn’t — the weight of rocks and soil pinned her chest like a cruel anchor. But her mind, oddly, stayed calm.
“I thought, I will not die like this. So I moved my hands.”
For five agonizing hours — with nothing but raw instinct and her bare fingers — she clawed through layers of packed mud. Her nails tore. Her muscles gave out. Her lungs begged. But she created just enough room to breathe. Just enough room to hope.
“We couldn’t find her. It was pitch dark, raining heavily, and the ground was still moving,” her father recalled, voice trembling. “We didn’t even know if she was alive.”
What’s more incredible? She wasn’t even waiting for rescue. She was rescuing herself.
By the time they found her — scratched, bruised, soaked, but alive — she had dug almost halfway to the surface.
“I don’t even remember being scared,” she said. “I was just... determined. I kept thinking of my mother’s face.”
The landslide, part of the larger devastation that gripped Mandi district during the June 30–July 1 cloudburst, flattened houses and drowned fields. Several families were displaced. But amidst the grief and destruction, Tuneja’s survival is now whispered like folklore.
Not because she was lucky. But because she refused not to survive.
Let’s be honest — most of us wouldn’t last five minutes in her situation. But for Tuneja Thakur, five hours under the earth wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning of one of Himachal’s most incredible survival stories.