Dozens of construction workers have been pulled alive from metal containers after being trapped for nearly two days by a deadly avalanche in the Himalayas.

Rescue teams from the Indian Army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police dug out some 46 people in an operation that lasted 60 hours in freezing temperatures. A further eight people were killed in the disaster. 

The avalanche struck  the village of Mana, Uttarakhand, in India last Friday following heavy snowfall near a construction site some 10,000 feet above sea level.

Many of those rescued were migrant labourers working on a highway project in the remote region 26 km away from the Line of Actual Control, a de facto border between India and China, according to local officials.