…. As she stood on the Roof of the World

New Delhi, June 10, 2011: It was literally a Himalayan wait for her! She reached the peak of the Mt. Everest, but the national and the Indian Air Force (IAF) flags she had to hoist there were with her team member who caught up with her only after an hour.

 

Nonetheless as Flight Lieutenant Nivedita stood on the Roof of the World, as Mt. Everest is being called as, on May 21^st she created history by becoming the first IAF woman officer to set foot on the mountain top. Nearly an hour after her another teammate Cpl Raju reached the summit with the flags and both of them hoisted the tricolour and the Air Force flag on the top.

For this girl from the quaint town of Jhunjhunu from Rajasthan, the scene from the top of the Mt Everest is etched in her memory forever.

“When I reached the summit I kept standing for one minute. Then I anchored myself and kneeled down towards the peak,” said Nivedita while describing her most memorable moment to The New Indian Express. What sweetened her achievement was the fact that she had beaten all her teammates by a good one hour margin to reach the top first.

Mt. Everest at 8,848 metres is the highest mountain in the world. What makes scaling the peak more difficult is the nearly absence of oxygen as one climbs up, the unfathomable crevasses, unannounced blizzards and bone chilling temperatures.

Talking about her “amazing” feat, Nivedita added, “It was a surreal experience. Only peaks of the mountains above 8,000 metres are visible when you are on the top of Mt. Everest. Then there is a layer of clouds.”

An engineer from Jaipur and a first to get into services from her family, Nivedita was commissioned into the IAF as a navigator for the transport workhorse An-32s. It was on 2009 that she set her eyes on Mt. Everest. The journey was not an easy one.

“The training has been very grueling. In the morning for three hours we used to do weight training followed by two hours of endurance run,” said Nivedita.

In fact, Nivedita’s mental toughness and physical stamina to scale Mt. Everest also took her team leader Group Captain NK Dahiya by surprise. Recalling the day, Dahiya said, “I was lying half dozing in my Summit Camp tent at South Col, holding the radio set in anxiety. Finally the radio crackled. Cutting through the noise of summit winds came in Nivedita’s voice- ‘Sir I am on the Summit’. The overflow of emotions was evident in her voice.”

“She surely had surprised me by beating even Cpl Raju Sindhu, the gentle giant of the team, to the summit by almost an hour,” Dahiya said.

Four days later the two were followed by six more teammates including three women officers – Squadron Leader Nirupama Pandey, Flight Lieutenant Rajika Sharma and Flt Lt Deepika Rao.

The first men team of IAF had scaled Mt. Everest in 2005. The achievement of these four women officers would definitely pave way for greater representation for females in the armed forces.