Who among the following achieved the distinction of being the first Indian mountaineer to scale Mount Everest and Mount Lhotse twice in one season ?

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Correct — B, Satyadeep Gupta. In the spring season of 2024, Satyadeep Gupta summited both Mount Everest and Mount Lhotse, and then did it again within the same season — the feat his expedition organisers called a 'double dual ascent'. The agency report of 28 May 2024 is explicit: he became the first person to scale Everest and Lhotse twice in one season, and the first Indian to traverse the two peaks in 11 hours and 15 minutes. The first round was Everest on 21 May 2024 and Lhotse on 22 May; on the repeat he topped Lhotse (8,516 m) at noon and Everest (8,849 m) at 12:45 am, climbing with the guides Pastemba Sherpa and Nima Ungdi Sherpa. The stem, if anything, understates the record — he was not merely the first Indian but the first person in the world to complete the double dual ascent. Why the pairing is possible at all is worth understanding: Everest and Lhotse share a route almost to the top. Climbers on the Nepal side follow the same Khumbu Icefall, Western Cwm and Lhotse Face and part company only at the South Col, about 7,900 m, where one path turns up the South-East Ridge to Everest and the other continues to Lhotse's summit. That shared approach is what lets a fit, acclimatised climber take both peaks in a single push — and, in Gupta's case, twice over in one weather window.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No account of the 2024 double dual ascent names him — the reports credit Satyadeep Gupta, climbing with Pastemba Sherpa and Nima Ungdi Sherpa. In a four-name current-affairs question, at least one option is usually a name with no connection to the record, and its function is to absorb the guess of a candidate who did not follow the season.  (c) The strongest decoy, because she set a genuine Everest record in exactly the same news cycle: on 20 May 2024, at sixteen, she became the youngest Indian and the second youngest girl in the world to summit Everest from the Nepal side. In December 2024 she went on to become the youngest female to complete the Seven Summits. A different record, one day earlier, on the same mountain.  (d) A famous name from an earlier generation. Premlata Agrawal, born in 1963 in Darjeeling, summited Everest in 2011 at the age of 48 and became the first Indian woman to complete the Seven Summits; she received the Padma Shri in 2013 and the Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award in 2017. Her records are about age and the Seven Summits, not about repeat ascents in a season.

Concept: Lhotse, at 8,516 metres the fourth-highest mountain on earth, is Everest's immediate neighbour, separated from it by the South Col. Because the standard south-side routes coincide from Base Camp through the Khumbu Icefall and up the Lhotse Face, an Everest permit-holder is already most of the way to Lhotse, and a Lhotse summit the day after an Everest summit has become a recognised objective for elite climbers. The limiting factor is not distance but the weather window: the pre-monsoon season on Everest opens for only a handful of days in late May when the jet stream lifts off the summit, and every expedition is queuing for the same window. Doing the pair twice inside one such season means descending, recovering and re-climbing above 8,000 metres — in the zone where the body cannot acclimatise and only deteriorates — which is why the achievement registered as a world first rather than an Indian one.

State PCS 2024 Q69 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q69 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer