- Lived:
- born 24 May 1954, Nakuri village near Uttarkashi, Garhwal (now Uttarakhand) — living, as of September 2026; the life happened on Everest, along the length of the Himalaya, and in Jamshedpur, where she trained a generation
- Field:
- mountaineering — first Indian woman on Everest, then four decades of expedition leadership and institution-building at the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation
- The Big Idea:
- She stood on the top of the world once, on 23 May 1984 — and then decided the better use of a summit was to spend the next forty years putting other Indian women on mountains.
- In their words:
- she has told interviewers, in nearly the same words for forty years, that Everest was not her destination but her starting point — paraphrased here, as our copyright rule for living figures requires
- If you remember one thing:
- A porter's daughter who was told mountaineering was no career for a woman became the first Indian woman on Everest — and measured the rest of her life not in her own summits but in everybody else's.