Himalayan Slides Kill 183 on Highway : India: Heavy snowfall strands 500 others in mountain tunnel, traps hundreds of vehicles. Massive rescue mounted.

NEW DELHI — Heavy snows brought avalanches and landslides crashing down onto a highway in mountainous northern India, killing at least 183 people and stranding as many as 500 others in a tunnel, Indian officials and media said Thursday.

A large-scale rescue operation was being mounted in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, with the help of the Indian army and air force, to rescue people marooned on the main Jammu-Srinagar highway. Nearly 400 vehicles, including 37 buses, were trapped there because of three days of heavy snowfall.

Indian news agencies said efforts so far had been unsuccessful to evacuate people believed to be huddled inside the 1 1/2-mile-long Jawahar Tunnel, 450 miles north of New Delhi.

Rescue helicopters were sent, but bad weather and high snowdrifts made it impossible for them to land safely in the remote, mountainous terrain, they said.

Indian media said the motorists had been trapped in the tunnel by snow and earthslides blocking both ends. But the Associated Press, reporting from Jammu, said police established Thursday that the people had taken shelter inside the tunnel after an avalanche cut off a main mountain road.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, police said the motorists were safe and that soldiers and villagers had brought them food and blankets, the news service reported.

Continued snow and rain were forecast for the area in the Himalayan foothills today, and such weather could further slow search and rescue efforts. About 5,000 people had been rescued from vehicles stranded along the highway, but hundreds more were believed missing, and there were fears that avalanches had carried them and their vehicles into mountain gorges.

Many small Indian-made Maruti sedans and jeeps were said to be entombed under eight to 10 feet of snow between the towns of Banihal and Kazigund, about midway on the road that runs through spectacular boulder-strewn slopes and pine-dotted valleys.

Officials said 133 bodies had been recovered by Thursday evening from buses and cars knocked by the snow into a deep gorge three miles from the tunnel. Another 50 bodies were found near the tunnel, news reports said. A spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir state government said 40 bodies had been found in three buses hit by massive avalanches last Tuesday.

That same day, a wall of snow swept away a communications center, further holding up the reporting of the worst disaster ever to strike the 186-mile north-south highway.

Thursday evening, Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao expressed shock and grief over the deaths caused by the unprecedented avalanches on the sole road linking the strategic and disputed Kashmir Valley with the rest of India.

Rao offered his condolences to the families of the victims and authorized the expenditure of more than $170,000 in payments to next of kin.

Reports on the scale of the disaster were still trickling into Jammu late Thursday, including one that inhabitants of two villages had found another buried bus containing 16 bodies. But the entire road had yet to be searched, and official sources told United News of India that the death toll could rise by hundreds as snow-clearing operations continued.

State officials said one stretch of road, from Jammu north to Rambad, had already been reopened and at least 13 busloads of stranded passengers had been taken south to Jammu. But some news reports quoted officials as saying other buses that had left Jammu for Srinagar, carrying more than 50 people, still had not been traced.

State officials appealed for help to the government in New Delhi, and Indian authorities sent nearly 30 tons of provisions on air force planes to Srinagar.