Santosh Yadav, born in a society where the birth of a son was considered a blessing, was the only woman to have scaled Mt Everest twice. Born in the small village of Joniyawas of Rewari District in Haryana, she was given the name ‘Santosh’, which means contentment. Santosh was determined to change her traditional way of life and fight for her education. At sixteen, most girls in her village married, and Santosh was under pressure from her parents to marry. She threatened her parents that she would never marry if she did not get a proper education and left home to enroll in a school in Delhi.
Santosh’s parents agreed to pay for her education, and she passed high school examinations and went to Jaipur, where she joined Maharani College and got a room in Kasturba Hostel. She remembers that she found out that only a few mountaineers could join her in climbing the Aravalli Hills. She saved money and enrolled in a course at Uttarkashi’s Nehru Institute of Mountaineering.
Santosh went on an annual expedition every year, developing her climbing skills rapidly and developing remarkable resistance to cold and altitude. Equipped with an iron will, physical endurance, and amazing mental toughness, she proved herself repeatedly. The culmination of her hard work and sincerity came in 1992, just four years after she had shyly asked the Aravalli mountaineers if she could join them.
At barely twenty years of age, Santosh Yadav scaled Mt Everest, becoming the youngest woman in the world to achieve the feat. Her climbing skills, physical fitness, and mental strength impressed her seniors, but her concern for others and desire to work together with them found her a special place in the hearts of fellow climbers. During the 1992 Everest mission, Santosh provided special care to a climber who lay dying at the South Col. She managed to save another climber, Mohan Singh, who would have met with the same fate had she not shared her oxygen with him.
Within twelve months, Santosh found herself a member of an Indo-Nepalese Women’s Expedition that invited her to join them. She then scaled the Everest a second time, setting a record as the only woman to have scaled the Everest twice and securing for herself and India a unique place in the annals of mountaineering. In recognition of her achievements, the Indian government bestowed upon her one of the nation’s top honours, the Padmashri.
Santosh also became an environmentalist, collecting and bringing down 500 kilograms of garbage from the Himalayas.
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