To mark 50 years of climb, Army sends team to Everest

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 1

Fifty years after the first Indian team, led by ace mountaineer Capt MS Kohli, reached Mount Everest, the Army today dispatched a 30-member team, tasked with multiple activities, to the Everest to mark the anniversary.

Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag flagged off the team this evening while spelling out the tasks of cleaning the Everest, participating in the Everest marathon besides climbing an adjoining peak.

The Army team led by Major Ranvir Singh Jamwal is divided into two parts — one will attempt a climb at the Everest (8,848 metre), while another will attempt the Lhotse peak (8,516 metre), which is close to the Everest and the fourth highest peak in the world.

With the help of Sherpas, the two teams will bring down some 4,000 kg trash that now litters the slopes of the Everest. Nearly 4,000 people have climbed the Everest since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first humans to set their foot on it, and littered the peak.

Nepal now has a rule that has a garbage deposit of $4,000 to be forfeited by any expedition from which each climber fails to bring back 8kg trash and human waste. The Indian Army team will be bringing back the trash of others also. “We have specially designed bags to carry back the trash,” Major Jamwal said. An equal amount of trash – 4,014 kg — was removed by a joint India-Nepal Army expedition in 2013.

The team will attempt the Everest between May 15 and May 31, coinciding with the first Indian team, which had submitted the Everest on May 21, 1965.

Capt Kohli, who was from the Indian Navy and a Padma Bhushan awardee, is much respected in strategic circles for a classic international espionage operation jointly carried out by India and the US in the late 1960s.