Arunima Sinha was a national volleyball player when robbers threw her from a moving train and a second train took her leg below the knee. Two years and one prosthetic limb later, she stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first female amputee in the world to get there.
A body built for one game
The athlete before the accident
Long before anyone called her the amputee who conquered Everest, Arunima Sinha was simply an athlete. She was born on 20 July 1989 in Ambedkar Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. Her father served in the army, and her mother worked as a health department supervisor.
Sport, in that household, was never treated as an indulgence. Arunima represented India as a national-level volleyball player, and she also played football. By her early twenties, she had already received a call letter from the Central Industrial Security Force. It is the paramilitary unit that guards India’s airports and public sector installations. She had, in other words, built an entire life around what a fit body could do. An accident was about to take that away from her. Proving it hadn’t would take her the next decade.
The night on the tracks
A gold chain, and a refusal
In mid-April 2011, Arunima was travelling from Lucknow to Delhi on the Padmavati Express. A group of robbers entered her compartment and demanded her bag and her mother’s gold chain. Most passengers, faced with an armed group on a moving train, would have handed over what was asked. Arunima resisted instead. The men overpowered her and threw her from the moving train. She landed on a parallel track just as a second train was approaching. It ran over her left leg below the knee.
A night no dressing could dull
No one reached her immediately. Arunima lay through the night on the tracks near Bareilly. Pain would have silenced most people’s resolve, not sharpened it. Only the following morning did villagers find her and carry her to hospital. By then, doctors had little choice left to them. To save her life, they amputated her left leg below the knee. She had also sustained multiple spinal fractures. Her right leg needed a steel rod from knee to ankle to hold it together. Surviving the night was its own small miracle. What came next, however, was a second fight, and one she had never expected to have to wage at all.
Fighting to be believed
What the police said happened instead
Railway police did not treat Arunima as the victim of an armed robbery. Instead, they publicly disputed her account. She had attempted suicide, they suggested, or jumped to avoid a ticket check. Consider what that accusation actually asked of her. Here was a young woman missing a leg, still in a hospital bed. They expected her to prove a crime had happened to her, rather than help her recover from one. Many survivors of violence face some version of this same disbelief, though rarely one printed in a newspaper. Arunima did not withdraw her account under the pressure. She repeated it, consistently, until the institutions around her had no reasonable way left to keep disputing it.
A court that took her side
Years afterwards, the Allahabad High Court ordered Indian Railways to pay Arunima five lakh rupees in compensation. The state government added a further two lakh rupees on top of that. It was a quiet, institutional confirmation, long after the fact. Her version of that night had been the true one all along. She had also received a free prosthetic leg during her four months of treatment. None of this undid what she had lost, of course. But it meant something that mattered: by the time Arunima left hospital, she had also, finally, been believed.
The Inspiring Arunima Sinha Story: A Promise Made in a Hospital Bed
“One day I decided to climb Everest”
Recovery, for Arunima, turned out to be less a return to her old life than a discovery that it no longer fit her. She later described those four months at AIIMS in the plainest possible terms: “I could not do anything on my own. But then one day I decided to climb the Everest.”
Cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s return to the game after cancer treatment was in the news at the time. It gave her a working model of what recovery could look like when a person refused to treat it as an ending. Nobody in that hospital ward had asked Arunima to set herself an impossible goal. She set it for herself, unaided, on a bed she could not yet even leave. She had not even relearned to walk on the leg she had left.
A teacher who had done it herself
Arunima reached out to Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman ever to summit Everest. Pal agreed to train her through the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation. What followed was over a year of preparation, and none of it was romantic. A basic mountaineering course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, in Uttarkashi, came first. Months of physical conditioning followed, on a leg that still bled at the socket on bad days.
Last of all came a practice climb of Island Peak in Nepal, above six thousand metres. Its only purpose was to learn whether an amputee’s body could function at that altitude at all. Nobody could have promised her the answer in advance. She had to go and find it for herself.
Fifty-Two Days, One Working Leg
The climb itself
The expedition began in April 2013, as part of a Tata Group-sponsored Eco Everest Expedition. It took fifty-two days from base camp to summit. On 21 May 2013, at 10:55 in the morning, Arunima Sinha reached the top of Mount Everest via its south side. According to Guinness World Records, she became the first female amputee in the world to do so. The final stretch alone took seventeen hours. Every step on her prosthetic side demanded a different kind of attention than the leg beside it did. The terrain forgave neither leg for failing.
The cylinder that was not hers
The climb very nearly killed her on the way back down. Descending from the summit, Arunima ran critically low on oxygen. At that altitude, the human body cannot sustain itself unaided for long. She survived only because a spare cylinder happened to be within reach, one that a British climber had left behind on the mountain. Arunima has since summed up that day in a single line: she had turned her artificial leg into her strength, choosing the hardest sport available to her deliberately. It reads less like a boast than like a description of method.
What She Carried Down the Mountain
Six more summits
Everest did not end the project. If anything, it confirmed the method behind it. Arunima went on to climb the highest peak on every other inhabited continent. Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe, Kosciuszko in Australia, Aconcagua in South America, Denali in North America, one after another. She completed the seventh and last, Vinson Massif in Antarctica, in January 2019. It made her the first female amputee anywhere to finish all seven. Each mountain demanded its own separate case be made to organisers, sponsors, and her own body. Finishing Everest had guaranteed nothing about how the next climb would go. Neither did any of the five that followed.
A school bought with prize money
Arunima used prize money from her achievements to buy land in Uttar Pradesh. A free sports academy for underprivileged and physically disabled children now stands on it. It was built from winnings that a body written off in 2011 went on to earn. She also wrote a memoir of her own recovery, titled Born Again on the Mountain. In 2015, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri, the country’s fourth-highest civilian honour. That same year also brought the Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award. By her own account, none of it was ever really about the medals.
Thrive Tip
A setback names an event, not a person. You cannot promise your child that misfortune will never find them, and it would not be kind to pretend otherwise. What you can do is become the person who insists, calmly and as many times as it takes, that a setback does not get to write the rest of your child’s story too.
The Parts That Happen Off the Mountain
The strength was already there
None of Arunima’s volleyball training was built with a mountain in mind. Nobody sets out to prepare a child for a train accident, or for what comes after one. But the discipline she had built through years of sport did not vanish along with her leg. It was the one thing the accident could not take from her. It became the exact resource she reached for once nothing else in her old life still applied.
For a parent, that is worth sitting with. You cannot know in advance which of your child’s early habits will matter later, or why. What you can do is create an ecosystem that helps your child build genuine strengths while there is still time to do it properly. It matters long before anyone needs it for a crisis nobody could have named.
The dream arrived before the readiness did
Arunima decided to climb Everest before she could walk unaided on her new leg. The dream came first, whole and definite, long before any of the training that would eventually support it. That order matters more than it looks like it should.
A student waiting to feel ready before naming an ambition out loud has the sequence backwards. Readiness is not a precondition for a dream. It is what a dream, once declared, sets out to build. But naming the dream is only the first step. It is the effort a person puts in afterwards, moving steadily towards it, that turns the dream into something real.
What followed for Arunima was over a year of unglamorous preparation: a mountaineering course, months of conditioning, a practice climb simply to test whether her body could manage the altitude at all. None of that came before the decision. All of it came because of it.
Nobody in her family said no
Arunima’s mother and brother backed her through the training that led to Everest. The timing alone made the plan sound reckless: a woman who had lost a leg two years earlier, proposing to climb the tallest mountain on Earth. Nobody in her family talked her out of it. That is harder to do than it sounds. Most parents, faced with a decision that frightening, would reach for caution instead. They would want to protect a child from a mountain they chose. Standing by a frightening decision, though, is not the same as agreeing that nothing could go wrong. It is trusting that the decision is genuinely your child’s to make, and staying close while they make it.
The Mountain Was Never the Hardest Part
It is tempting to remember Arunima Sinha’s story as being mainly about Everest. Everest, after all, is the part with a summit photograph and a Guinness World Records certificate attached to it.
Read the story in order, though, and the mountain starts to look like the easier half. Being disbelieved by the very people meant to help her, in a hospital bed, with one leg already gone, asked more of her than any glacier did. She met it with the same refusal she later carried up the mountain itself.
What I Believe (the manifesto) — on meeting a child’s fear with empathy, never contempt. A summit makes for a better photograph, admittedly. The harder ground, in Arunima’s story as in most others, was the ground she crossed long before the climbing even began.
