Maha woman scales Mt Annapurna, world’s 10th highest peak

Mumbai: Priyanka Mohite from Satara in western Maharashtra has scaled Mt Annapurna, the 10th highest mountain peak in the world, becoming the first Indian woman climber to achieve the feat.

The news of the 28-year-old climbing the peak was shared by her employer Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the Executive Chairperson of Biocon Limited.

“Our colleague Priyanka Mohite scaled the peak of Mt. Annapurna, (8091 metres) 10th highest mountain in the world, on 16th April 2021 at 1.30 pm. – first Indian woman to do so! We at @SyngeneIntl are so very proud of her,” she tweeted.

The Biocon boss also shared a photo of Priyanka Mohite holding the national flag atop the peak.

Mount Annapurna is a massif in the Himalayas located in Nepal that includes one peak over 8,000 metres and is considered to be one of the toughest mountains to climb.

Priyanka has also climbed the world’s highest peak Mount Everest (8,849 metres) in 2013, Mount Lhotse (8,516 metres) in 2018, Mount Makalu (8,485 metres) and also Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895 metres) in 2016.

Passionate about mountaineering since childhood, Priyanka started to scale mountains in the Sahyadri range of Maharashtra as a teenager and in 2012 scaled Bandarpunch, a mountain massif of the Garhwal division of the Himalayas, in Uttarakhand, her brother Akash Mohite told PTI.

In 2015 Priyanka scaled Mt Menthosa which at 6443 metres is the second-highest peak in the Lahaul and Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.

The Bengaluru-based climber is also the recipient of the Maharashtra Government’s Shiv Chhatrapati state award for adventure sports for 2017-2018.

She works with Syngene International Limited, Biocon”s research organisation offering pharma and biotechnology majors customised solutions in synthetic chemistry and molecular biology for early-stage drug discovery and development.