Four tribal students from Chandrapur scale Mount Everest, create history

Nagpur, May 17: They are studying in a Ashram School for the tribal boys in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra and had no chance to know about the highest peak in the world that they would not have otherwise even dreamt of seeing. But these four students including a girl, created a history of sorts by scaling the Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world on Wednesday.

Kavidas Kathmode (18), and Umakant Madavi (19) were the first to reach the top of the Mount Everest followed by Parmesh Ale (19) and Manisha Dhurve (18) arrived there at 4.25 am on Wednesday, respectively.

They were the part of the ‘Mission Shourya’ expedtiton dispatched from Chandrapur to scale Mount Everest.

The credit to launch this initiative to hone the adventure sports skills of the tribal students studying in the Ashram Schools run by the government in the remote areas of the state, goes to the Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar who belongs to Chandrapur. Mungantiwar is known for his innovative programs to encourage the tribal students to take up new challenges. The Mission Shourya is launched with this objective to train tribal students in the art of mountaineering.

 The participating students were identified and selected for further training in mountaineering and Finance Minister himself was monitoring their progress in spite of his busy schedule. Ten students of this group had gone on the campaign to scale Mount Everest a month ago and four of them finally succeeded in reaching atop the tallest mountain of the world on Wednesday.

Their mission was flagged off on April 8. The team arrived at Kathmandu on April 11 and flew to Lhasa on April 13. They reached the base camp on April 20. After a four day acclimatization schedule the team reached the advance base camp at the height of 6400 meters. After going through successive acclimatization schedules at various heights the team finally moved ahead.

Umakant and Kavidas climbed the Mount Everest at 3.25 am on Wednesday while Paramesh reached there at 4.25 and Manisha at 4.35 am respectively. Other two climbers, Indu Kannake and Vikas Soyam are expected to climb to the summit on May 17, subject to weather conditions.

Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar congratulated these successful students for their extraordinary achievement.