Mountaineering is quite popular in India, since the entire northern and north-eastern borders are the Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world. The apex body in India is the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, which is affiliated to the International Federation of Sport Climbing.
India has several premier mountaineering institutes. The four National Institutes are :
Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling
Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi
Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering and Winter Sports, Pahalgam
National Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Sports (NIMAS), Dirang, Arunachal Pradesh Sonam Gyatso Mountaineering Institute, Gangtok The other institutes are : Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports (ABVIMAS), Manali Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering, Gulmarg Swami Vivekanand Institute of Mountaineering, Mount Abu Guardian Giripremi Institute of Mountaineering (GGIM), Pune, Maharashtra
Indian mountaineers
Ashish Mane
Krushnaa Patil
Asim Mukhopadhyay
Mohan Singh Kohli
Narendra Dhar Jayal
Mandip Singh Soin
Gurdial Singh
Dawa Thondup
Narendra Kumar
Sudipta Sengupta
Bachendri Pal
Kuntal Joisher
Nirupama Pandey
Jaahnavi Sriperambuduru
Malavath Purna
Chandra Prakash Vohra
Sonam Gyatso
Mohan Singh Gunjyal
Santosh Yadav
Colonel Ajay Kothiyal
Colonel Saurabh Singh Shekhawat
Lt. Colonel Ranveer Jamwal
Malli Mastan Babu
Role of The Doon School
The faculty and students of The Doon School, a boys-only boarding school in Dehradun founded in 1935, are credited to be among the early pioneers of mountaineering in a newly independent India. The founding headmaster and teachers, including A.E. Foot, R.L. Holdsworth, J.A.K. Martyn and Jack Gibson, were all Alpinists. Along with Gurdial Singh, who joined as faculty, and Narendra Dhar Jayal, then a student at Doon, they were among the first to go on major Himalayan expeditions 1940s onwards. Jayal later went on to pioneer Indian mountaineering and, at Jawaharlal Nehru's behest, became the founder principal of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.