Mountaineering

Anshu Jamsenpa is an Indian mountaineer and the first woman in the world to scale the summit of Mount Everest twice in a season, and the fastest double summiter to do so within five days. It is also the fastest double ascent of the tallest crest by a woman. She is from Bomdila, headquarters of West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh - the state that holds the most north-eastern position in India.

Aparna Kumar is an Indian mountaineer. In 2018, she was awarded the Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award for land adventure, presented by the President of India.

Archana Sardana is India's first female BASE jumper. She is a certified skydiver and was the first person to skydive with the Indian flag in the United States of America. Sardana has done 335 skydives and 45 BASE jumps across the globe.

Arjun Vajpai (born 9 June 1993) is an Indian mountaineer who became the world's youngest mountaineer to summit six peaks over 8,000 meters in the year 2018. Arjun climbed Mount Everest in 2010 at the age of 16 years, 11 months, and 18 days, becoming the youngest Indian to climb Everest at that time. He broke a record set by Krushnaa Patil of Maharashtra, who climbed Mount Everest at the age of 19.

Ashish Mane (born 14 August 1990) is an Indian mountaineer. He has scaled Mount Everest (2012), Lhotse (2013), Makalu (2014), Manaslu (2017), and Kanchenjunga (2019). Ashish is the only climber from Maharashtra as of now, to ascend five of the fourteen eight-thousander peaks over 8,000 meters (26,250 ft) above sea level.

Asim Mukhopadhyay (Bengali: অসীম মুখোপাধ্যায়, also known as Asim Mukherjee Bengali: অসীম মুখার্জি; 10 May 1929 – 28 January 2013) was a figure in the history of mountaineering in West Bengal, India. He was the pioneer in India for organizing high altitude scientific expeditions in the Himalayan region. He took part in many such expeditions as a climber between 1959 and 1974, and organised a few more in that period and later as an administrator.

Avtar Singh Cheema (1933–1989) was the first Indian born man and the 16th person in world to climb Mount Everest. Along with 8 others he was a part of the third mission undertaken by the Indian Army, in 1965, to climb Mount Everest after two failed attempts. , and was led by Captain M S Kohli.

Bachendri Pal (born 24 May 1954) is an Indian mountaineer. She is the first Indian woman to climb the summit of the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest. She is a recipient of the third highest civilian award in India, Padma Bhushan.

Bhawna Dehariya (born 12 November 1991) is an Indian mountaineer born in Village Tamia, District Chhindawara, Madhya Pradesh. She reached the summit of summit of Mount Everest on 22 May 2019. She holds a Guinness World Records title for promoting and popularising Indian Himalaya with the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute on 15 August 2020 (Independence Day).

Chandraprabha Aitwal (born 24 December 1941) is an Indian mountain climber and one of the pioneers of Indian women mountaineers. She was awarded 2009 Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award for Lifetime Achievement, given by the Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. She has climbed Nanda Devi, Kangchenjunga, Trishuli and Mt.

Chhanda Gayen (Bengali: ছন্দা গায়েন; 9 July 1979 – 20 May 2014) was an Indian mountaineer and martial artist. She is best known for being the first, and fastest, Indian to climb two eight-thousanders, Mount Everest and Lhotse, in one go, which she did on 18 May 2013. She completed the traverse from the summit of Mount Everest to the summit of Lhotse in 22 hours.

Darshan Kumar Khullar is an Indian mountaineer, writer and a former Brigadier of the Indian Army. He led the Everest expedition which included Bachendri Pal and Phu Dorjee that summitted the peak in May 1984. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Shri in 1984.

Debabrata Mukherjee (born 20 January 1962) is an Indian mountaineer and explorer from West Bengal. He was the oldest, first civilian Indian to climb Mount Everest from the North Col. He is also the first person to cross Chaukhamba Col from Badrinath to reach Gangotri.

Dipankar Ghosh was an Indian mountaineer from West Bengal. He is the first Bengali to climb Mount Everest and had successfully climbed five other eight-thousand-meter peaks besides Mount Everest. In 2019, the Government of India posthumously honored him with the Tenzing Norgay Adventure Award for the year 2018, the highest adventure sports honor in India.

Gurdial Singh (1 January 1924 – 30 May 2023) was an Indian schoolteacher and mountaineer who led the first mountaineering expedition of independent India to Trisul (7,120 metres) in 1951. In 1958, he led the team that made the first ascent of Mrigthuni (6,855 metres). In 1965, he was a member of the first successful Indian expedition team to climb Mount Everest.

Hari Pal Singh Ahluwalia (6 November 1936 – 14 January 2022) was an Indian mountaineer, author, social worker and Indian Ordnance Factories Service (IOFS) officer. During his career he made contributions in the fields of adventure, sports, environment, disability and social work. He is one of six Indian men and the twenty first man in the world to climb Mount Everest.

Harbhajan Singh is an Indian mountaineer, known for his successful mountaineering expeditions of Mount Everest, Mount Nanda Devi and many other peaks in the Himalayan region. The Government of India honored him in 2011, with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri.

Harish Kapadia (born 11 July 1945) is a Himalayan mountaineer, author and long-time editor of the Himalayan Journal from India. He has written numerous books and articles on the Indian Himalayas. and has been invited to many countries to lecture on his Himalayan exploits.

Jaahnavi Sriperambuduru is an Indian mountaineer and motivational speaker. She is on her mission to climb the highest peaks of all seven continents known as the Seven Summits and also to reach the farthest point on the globe "The South Pole" and "The North Pole". She is on her pursuit for the Grand Slam to become the youngest Girl in the World in her Phase I climbs.

Jamling Tenzing Norgay (born 23 April 1965) is an Indian mountaineer and author, best known for summiting Mount Everest as part of the 1996 Everest IMAX expedition. He was born in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, and is the son of Tenzing Norgay.

Kalpana Dash (Odia: କଳ୍ପନା ଦାଶ; 7 July 1966 – 23 May 2019) was an Indian mountaineer who was the first Odia climber to scale Mount Everest. She scaled Mount Everest on 21 May 2008, along with a team of five members from the United States, Canada and Nepal. Dash had attempted to climb Mount Everest twice before, once in 2004 and once in 2006, but failed due to bad weather and health conditions.

Kanhaya Lal Pokhriyal (born 10 January 1949) is an Indian police official and mountaineer, known for climbing the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest in 1992. He was born on 10 January 1949 in the small village of Sachkhil in the Pauri Garhwal district of the Indian state of Uttarakhand and has served the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. He is the only Indian mountaineer to have climbed Kanchenjunga through two routes, from Sikkim and Nepal.

Krushnaa Patil is an Indian mountaineer. In 2009, at the age of 19, she became the youngest Indian woman to successfully climb Mount Everest, earth's highest mountain. Her record of the youngest Indian to climb Everest has subsequently been surpassed by younger climbers.

Kuntal Joisher (born 26 February 1980) is an Indian mountaineer based in Mumbai. On 15 May 2018, he stood on top of Mt. Lhotse, the 4th highest mountain in the world at 8516 meters.

Malavath Poorna (born 10 June 2000) is an Indian mountaineer. On 25 May 2014, Poorna climbed Mount Everest, aged 13 years and 11 months, the youngest female to have reached the summit. Poorna climbed Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe on 27 July 2017.

Mastan Babu Malli (3 September 1974 – 24 March 2015) was an Indian mountaineer. In 2006, he broke the previous record by climbing the Seven Summits in 172 days, starting on January 19th, 2006 and finishing on July 10th, 2006. This accomplishment also made him the first South Asian to climb all seven summits, and the first Indian to climb Vinson Massif, and the Puncak Jaya, (also known as the Carstensz Pyramid).

Mamta Sodha is an Indian sportsperson, known for her successful 2010 attempt to scale Mount Everest. She was honoured by the Government of India, in 2014, by bestowing on her the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, for her services to the field of mountaineering sport.

Mandip Singh Soin (born 9 March 1957) is a prominent Indian mountaineer, explorer, adventure travel expert, environmentalist, speaker and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has spent over fifty years in the field of adventure, having gone on expeditions to all the seven continents of the world. His mountaineering ascents and explorations include several Indian “firsts” like the first Indian ascent of Mount Meru in 1986 in the Himalayas as well as several first Indian ascents in the French and Swiss Alps, Italian Dolomites, Wales and Scotland.

Mohan Singh Gunjyal is an Indian mountaineer and adventure sportsman. He is one of the summiters of Mount Everest, entering the list when he successfully climbed the highest peak in the world on 12 May 1992. He achieved the feat, taking the Southeast ridge route via the south face, as a member of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Everest expedition group, which included Santosh Yadav, the first woman to summit the peak twice within a year.

Captain Mohan Singh Kohli (11 December 1931 – 23 June 2025) was an Indian Navy officer and mountaineer, who led the 1965 Indian Everest Expedition, which saw nine men reach the summit of Everest, a world record which was unbroken for 13 years.

Nalini Sengupta is an Indian educationist and mountaineer, best known for serving as the founder and principal of Vidya Valley School since 2001, and being the namesake of Mount Nalini in the Himalayas, after it was first summited in 2015. In 1970, Sengupta graduated as a mountaineering coach of the first mountaineering course for women offered by the National Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports. In July 2015, a team of 40 mountaineers from the Guardian Giripremi Institute of Mountaineering summited peak 5260 in the Himalayas, near the Hampta Pass region of Manali, Himachal Pradesh.

Narendra Dhar Jayal (Nandu Jayal) (25 June 1927 – 28 April 1958) was an Indian mountaineer and an officer of the Bengal Sappers and the Indian Army Corps of Engineers. He is credited with pioneering and patronizing early post-Independence mountaineering in India, and was the founder principal of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. He encouraged the youth of India to take up mountaineering, and has been called the "Marco Polo of Indian Mountaineering".

Colonel Narendra Kumar, PVSM, KC, AVSM, FRGS (8 December 1933 – 31 December 2020) was an Indian soldier and mountaineer. He is known for his expeditions across various mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and Karakorams, and respective subranges such as the Pir Panjals and Saltoro Mountains. His reconnaissance efforts on the Siachen glacier were key to the Indian Army's reclamation of the forward posts of the glacier in Operation Meghdoot in 1984.

Nawang Gombu (1 May 1936 – 24 April 2011) was a Sherpa mountaineer who was the first man in the world to have climbed Mount Everest twice. Gombu was born in Minzu, Tibet and later became an Indian citizen, as did many of his relatives including his uncle Tenzing Norgay. He was the youngest Sherpa to reach 26,000 ft.

Wing Commander Nirupama Pandey is an Indian mountaineer. She is the first person from Bihar to have scaled Mount Everest on 25 May 2011 at 1015 hrs (IST). Nirupama was part of the first-ever all-woman IAF team comprising flight lieutenant Nivedita Choudhary and flight lieutenant Rajika Sharma.

Phu Dorjee Sherpa (1928-1969) (sometimes written as Phu Dorji) was the 23rd person in the world to climb Mount Everest.

Premlata Agrawal (born 1963) is the first Indian woman to scale the Seven Summits, the seven highest continental peaks of the world. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2013 and Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award in 2017 for her achievements in the field of mountaineering.); at the age of 48 years at that time while Sangeeta Sindhi Bahl hailing from Jammu and Kashmir broke Premlata's record on 19 May 2018 and became the oldest Indian woman to climb Mount Everest at the age of 53.

Raghav Joneja (born 21 October 1997) is the second-youngest Indian to climb Mount Everest on 21 May 2013 at the age of 15 years and 7 months. He was part of an expedition by the students of The Lawrence School, Sanawar which was the youngest team in the world to climb the mountain. Lawrence became the first school in the world to send a team to the highest peak.

Sangeeta Sindhi Bahl (born 9 February 1965) became the oldest Indian woman to climb Mount Everest (8,848.86 m) when she summited in May 2018 at the age of 53.

Santosh Yadav (born 10 October 1967) is an Indian mountaineer. She is the first woman in the world to climb Mount Everest twice and the first woman to successfully climb Mount Everest from Kangshung Face. As a youth she criticized traditional societal beliefs including standards of dress for women.

Shivangi Pathak is an Indian mountaineer born in Hisar, Haryana in August 2002. She climbed Russia's highest peak Mount Elbrus in Europe on 2 September 2018. She also climbed the highest peak of Africa, Kilimanjaro, on 24 July 2018 at the age of 17.

Sudipta Sengupta (born 20 August 1946) is a professor in structural geology in Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, and a trained mountaineer. She is one of the first Indian women (along with Aditi Pant) to set foot on Antarctica. She is also popularly known in India for her book Antarctica in Bengali and numerous articles and television interviews on geosciences.

Sunita Singh Choken (born c. 1985) is an Indian mountaineer and activist. She climbed Mount Everest in 2011.

Tenzing Norgay (Sherpa: བསྟན་འཛིན་ནོར་རྒྱས tendzin norgyé; May 1914 – 9 May 1986), born Namgyal Wangdi, and also referred to as Sherpa Tenzing, was a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer. On 29 May 1953, he and Edmund Hillary were the first confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, as part of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition. Time named Norgay one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Tine Mena (Hindi: तिने मिन; born 17 September 1986) is an Indian mountaineer, who on 9 May 2011 became the first woman from Northeast India & Arunachalee woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.