ROURKELA: A professional mountaineer Ashok V Mishra has managed to bag ‘adventure village’ status for the non-descript resettlement (RS) colony of Rourkela. Blessed with the undulating Durgapur hill, the area is today known for mountaineering which was introduced by Mishra three years back.
Recently, the India Book of Records acknowledged the RS Colony as an adventure village for training 60 children in adventure activities from a single village. Mishra now wants to turn the RS Colony into an adventure tourism site and introduce the concept of rural homestay which is promoted by the Ministry of Tourism.
After returning from Delhi during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, Mishra started training poor children of the colony, Bartoli and nearby areas in mountaineering which was a new concept in Sundargarh. He has so far imparted basic mountaineering skills to about 150 children of the total 250 children in the area. He aims to train the remaining children in adventure sports like mountaineering, rock climbing, trekking and hiking.
He said the best 10 children representing Odisha have played zonal and national competitions in Jamshedpur in the recent past. Eight of them participated in the National Open Sports Climbing Championship organised by the Sports department of West Bengal government at Kolkata from February 28 to March 2.
Mishra said he would request the Sports department of West Bengal to send their players to Rourkela to promote adventure sports and help build the adventure community here.
Apart from training the children, he has established a climbing centre and an artificial climbing wall in the colony and trains children in mountaineering at the adjacent Durgapur hill. “There is also a potential for rural homestay in the colony where people can be exposed to rural lifestyle and wilderness,” he said.