WARANGAL: While the entire nation is talking about the four students from two tribal ashram (residential) schools of Chandrapur, Maharashtra, who scaled the Mount Everest recently, most don’t know that the inspiration behind executing this feat extraordinaire comes from Telangana’s daughter Malavath Poorna. Poorna, from Nizamabad district, had on May 25, 2014, conquered the highest peak of Mount Everest at the age of 13, and by doing so, had become the youngest girl in the world to have reached the summit of Everest.
And there’s another thing that many don’t know. The man behind Mission Shaurya, under which the tribal school students were trained to scale Mount Everest, also hails from Warangal. Dr M Raja Dayanidhii, a 2014 batch IAS officer from Puppalagutta in Warangal, who as assistant sub-collector of Chandrapur and project officer of Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP), Chandrapur, with the support of principal secretary (Tribal development) Manisha Verma and Chandrapur collector Ashutosh Salil, had launched the mission to train these children.
Trained under the Mission Shaurya, on May 16 four tribal students from Maharashtra - Umakant Madavi (19), Parmesh Ale (19), Manisha Dhurve (18) and Kavidas Kathmode (18) - successfully scaled Mount Everest.It all started during Dayanidhii’s tenure as a project officer of ITDP Chandrapur between November 2016 and December 2017. “Poorna episode had made a great impact on our minds. In this connection, I met Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions secretary RS Praveen Kumar, whom I have known for a couple of years.
I was fascinated by the way the potential of young tribals was being explored and they were being given proper platform enabling them to carve a niche for themselves. It was during the same time that the movie ‘Poorna’ was released. On a hot afternoon in the May of 2017, I was travelling with Chandrapur collector Ashutosh Salil to a tribal Taluka called ‘Jeevti’. The discussion of Poorna came up and we pondered upon trying it in Chandrapur Tribal Ashram schools, which come under project officer ITDP Chandrapur. The discussion ended up in deciding to take up something concrete for providing a platform for the Tribals youngsters to explore their innate athletic ability.
The first step
Mission Shaurya was launched in July of 2017. The selection process begun with a school-level screening of 50 students, of which 45 were selected for the foundation training in Wardha. Further short-listing led to 18 students being selected for a mountaineering course at Darjeeling. Later, 13 of them were sent for advanced training.