Bachendri Pal

On 23 May 1984, Bachendri Pal of Uttarkashi stood on the summit of Everest, the first Indian woman to do so. She then spent four decades building Indian mountaineering, leading all-women expeditions and training thousands of climbers.

She was born on 24 May 1954 in Nakuri village near Uttarkashi, a trader's daughter in the Bhagirathi valley, and trained at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in her home town against every convention about what a hill daughter should do.

Selected for India's 1984 Everest expedition, she survived an avalanche at camp on the Lhotse face and pushed on to the top, reaching the summit a day before her thirtieth birthday. She was the fifth woman in the world to climb the mountain.

She went on to lead rather than just climb: the Indo-Nepalese all-women Everest expedition of 1993, the Ganga rafting expedition from Haridwar to Calcutta, and the trans-Himalayan traverse of 1997. Heading adventure programmes at Tata Steel, she mentored a generation of Indian climbers, including Everest summiteers from her own state, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2019.