Nepal’s own law barred her from climbing there, since she was too young. Malavath Poorna summited Everest anyway, from the tougher Tibetan side, at 13.
✊ Must Know
1. The 2014 Everest Climb, and Her Seven Summits Journey
- Fact Malavath Poorna was born on 10 June 2000, in Pakala village, Nizamabad district, Telangana. Her family were Dalit agricultural labourers.
- Fact She trained under mountaineer Shekhar Babu for about eight months, through a programme sponsored by a Telangana state welfare society.
- Result On 25 May 2014, at age 13 years and 11 months, she summited Mount Everest. She became the youngest girl in the world to do so.
- Fact She summited via the Tibetan (north) side of Everest, not the more common Nepal side, because Nepalese law barred climbers under 16 from that route.
- Fact She was accompanied by Sadhanapalli Anand Kumar, a 16-year-old boy from her own village.
- Fact She completed the Seven Summits challenge on 5 June 2022, with Denali, North America’s highest peak, as her final climb.
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2. Honours, the UN Invitation, and the 2017 Film
- Fact Her earlier Seven Summits climbs included Kilimanjaro (2016), Elbrus (2017), and then Aconcagua, Carstensz Pyramid, and Vinson, all in 2019.
- Fact In 2014, the Telangana government felicitated her with ₹25 lakh in cash, a five-acre plot of land, and a house.
- Link In 2015, she was invited to speak at the United Nations‘ Sustainable Development Summit.
- Data Applications to her own school jumped from 8,700 to 60,000 within a year of her Everest climb.
- Fact A 2017 Hindi film, “Poorna: Courage Has No Limit,” directed by Rahul Bose, dramatised her story.
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💎 Great to Know
3. Not Always the Same “Seven Summits”
- Instead Her Seven Summits list used Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia for its Oceania peak. This is a different, harder variant of the challenge than the more common list, which instead uses Australia’s Mount Kosciuszko.
- Link Fellow Indian climbers Premlata Agarwal and Arunima Sinha, covered elsewhere on this site, completed the Kosciuszko-based list instead. “Completing the Seven Summits” doesn’t always mean the exact same seven peaks.
- Why The circumstance that sent her up Everest’s harder north face was a legal technicality, not a deliberate choice. Nepal’s under-16 rule simply left her no other route.
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