When most people struggle to get out of bed in winter, a team from a little town in Arunachal Pradesh was busy rewriting mountaineering history in the icy heights of Ladakh.
Twenty peaks. Twenty-three days. All of them above 6,000 metres. All of them unclimbed — until now.
The National Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Sports, better known as NIMAS, has pulled off one of the most remarkable mountaineering achievements in recent Indian history. Based in Dirang, tucked away in the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, this institute quietly went to Ladakh and came back with a record that most seasoned climbers would find jaw-dropping.
These weren’t weekend hikes. The Ladakh terrain NIMAS pushed through is some of the most remote, brutal, and technically demanding in the entire Himalayan range. Thin air. Bitter cold. Routes where one wrong step doesn’t give you a second chance. The team didn’t just survive it — they summited 20 peaks that no human being had ever stood on top of before.
Leading the expedition was Colonel Ranveer Singh Jamwal, the Director of NIMAS. Under his command, the team moved with a discipline and efficiency that turned what sounds impossible on paper into a real, documented achievement.
And here’s the thing that makes this even more remarkable — this isn’t the first time NIMAS has done something like this. The institute has now recorded its third consecutive world record in three years. Three years in a row. That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It speaks to a culture, a system, and a vision that has clearly taken deep root in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh.
NIMAS operates under the Ministry of Defence and carries a unique distinction — it is the only Government of India institute that offers training and expedition programmes across land, air, and water-based adventure sports simultaneously. Mountaineering, sport climbing, paragliding, paramotoring, white-water rafting, kayaking, mountain biking, scuba diving — the range is staggering, and it all runs out of Dirang.
There’s something quietly powerful about the fact that this record comes from the Northeast. From Arunachal Pradesh, no less — a state that the rest of the country often forgets when it talks about India’s achievements in sports or adventure. NIMAS has been doing the work anyway, building real-world capabilities in terrain that tests the limits of human endurance. The Ladakh expedition wasn’t just a mountaineering mission. The institute said it was also meant to inspire young people across the country to take up adventure sports, to build fitness, discipline, and the kind of grit that only comes from putting yourself against something much bigger than you.
Twenty summits, each one a first ascent, each one now carrying the footprint of a team from Dirang, Arunachal Pradesh.
The Northeast has always had mountains. It has always had warriors. What NIMAS is proving, one expedition at a time, is that it also has climbers who can stand on top of the world — and not just on the peaks they know, but on the ones no one has touched before.
That’s not just a record. That’s a statement.
