Crowds cheered as emergency vehicles with lights flashing readied to leave the tunnel entrance, where the workers had been trapped since a portion of the under-construction tunnel in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand collapsed on November 12.
“An initial health check-up of all the workers is being done in the temporary medical camp built in the tunnel,” Uttarakhand state chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.
Relatives outside had already begun celebrating even before the first man was pulled out.
Agence France-Presse reporters spoke to family members waiting at the site who confirmed the exhausted men had been freed, pulled out through 57 metres (187 feet) of steel pipe on stretchers specially fitted with wheels.
The rescue mission had grabbed the country’s attention for 17 days. The labourers were pulled out through a passageway made of welded pipes which rescuers previously pushed through dirt and rocks.
They got trapped on November 12, when a landslide caused a portion of the 4.5-kilometre (2.8-mile) tunnel they were building in Uttarakhand state to collapse about 200 metres (650 feet) from the entrance.
The workers, who survived on food and oxygen supplied through narrow steel pipes, were to be taken to a makeshift health centre inside the 13-metre wide tunnel, officials said.
Rescuers resorted to manual digging after the drilling machine broke down irreparably on Friday while drilling horizontally from the front because of the mountainous terrain of Uttarakhand. The machine bored through about 47 metres of the 57-60 metres needed, before rescuers started to work by hand to create a passageway to evacuate the trapped workers.
02:15
Indian authorities release video of first visual contact with trapped tunnel workers
Indian authorities release video of first visual contact with trapped tunnel workers
Rescue teams inserted pipes into dug-out areas and welded them together so the workers could be brought out on wheeled stretchers.
Rescuers on Sunday also began to create a vertical channel with a newly replaced drilling machine as a contingency plan.
What began as a rescue mission expected to take a few days turned into weeks, and officials were hesitant to give a timeline for when it might be completed.
Most of the trapped workers were migrant labourers from across the country. Many of their families had travelled to the location, where they camped out for days to get updates on the rescue effort and in hopes of seeing their relatives soon.
‘Worried’: India tunnel rescue ‘more complex’ amid switch to manual drilling
‘Worried’: India tunnel rescue ‘more complex’ amid switch to manual drilling
Authorities supplied the trapped workers with hot meals through a 15-centimetre pipe after days of surviving only on dry food sent through a narrower pipe.
They got oxygen through a separate pipe, and more than a dozen doctors, including psychiatrists, were at the site monitoring their health.
The tunnel the workers were building was designed as part of the Chardham all-weather road, which will connect various Hindu pilgrimage sites. Some experts say the project, a flagship initiative of the federal government, will exacerbate fragile conditions in the upper Himalayas, where several towns are built atop landslide debris.
Large numbers of pilgrims and tourists visit Uttarakhand’s many Hindu temples, with the number increasing over the years because of the continued construction of buildings and roadways.