At a time when the Women’s Premier League is set to usher in a brighter dawn for women cricketers in the country, the first Indian woman to scale Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen is seeking alms. The petite Piyali Basak, 31, looks like a teenager, but when she speaks, the determination is testimony to the grit that made her scale the world’s highest peaks with an enviable natural oxygen saturation level. When I met her in Calcutta this week, Piyali was excited about her forthcoming twin expeditions to Annapurna (8,091 metres or 27,000 feet) and Makalu (8,481 metres or 28,000 feet) peaks on March 7. She is aware that Annapurna is a treacherous climb and has witnessed the maximum fatalities and that Makalu has seen casualties of state mountaineers, but plans to summit both without any supplemental oxygen, the way she did Mount Everest last year. She ran into a killer blizzard while attempting to scale the world’s highest mountain, hence her feat of unfurling the Tricolour on that summit holds a special place in her heart.
Piyali (a mathematics graduate who is a primary school teacher) and her sister Tamali (an adventure sports instructor) come from an impoverished family and are coping with their father’s dementia. She has taken loans of over Rs 40 lakh to fund her Everest expedition and is optimistically awaiting assistance from the government as the lack of funds is a major hurdle. “My initial papers have been cleared by Nepal, but we need to pay in advance and that is my biggest worry,” Piyali said.
When she had returned from the Everest expedition with a record to her name, there were felicitations and promises galore. In June last year, the people of her hometown, Chandannagar, Hooghly, and mountaineers had hailed the rare achievement. The state information and cultural affairs minister, Indranil Sen (the local MLA), even handed over a cheque of Rs 3 lakh to Piyali following an initiative taken by the Chandannagar Utsav Committee. He had encouraged Piyali to go ahead and fulfil her dreams to conquer the maximum number of summits without oxygen to set a world record, bringing fame to the state and the nation and asked Piyali to communicate with the state sports department to avail of help for her future expeditions.
Piyali said she was to be ‘honoured’ by the state government at its annual youth festival in November last year, but the event was not organised at all. The gutsy mountaineer is running from pillar to post as the deadline approaches. Just after her Everest feat on May 22 last year, a delegation of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders had visited their humble home and told her family that the prime minister would like to meet her. Piyali is still awaiting that call; there has been no word from that team since her return.
With no help forthcoming from the Bengal authorities, or even mountaineering bodies, she wonders if a tweet tagging the prime minister, the sports minister, the ministry of sports, the Mountaineering Federation of India and MyGovIndia would help since the Union government is known to respond to direct requests on Twitter.
But the country’s apathy towards sportspersons in need of succour, especially women, has been appalling. Where else would medal-winning sprint queens like Asha Roy face starvation, or a footballer like Rashmita Patra be forced to sell betel nuts for a livelihood? The archery champion, Nisha Rani Dutta, had to sell her bow to make ends meet, while Poulami Adhikari, who represented India in football, makes a living as a food delivery girl, to name a few. Where does that leave nonpareil mountaineers like Piyali? Any civilised country would have feted her, but in a country where politicians unabashedly grab undeserving awards, will true merit and talent ever be recognised?
