Narendra Dhar Jayal

In 1958, the Government sponsored an expedition to Cho Oyu (28,867 ft), one of the highest mountains of the world. Jayal died of pulmonary oedema caused by overexertion on this expedition at Camp I. He had started late and tried to catch up with the main party. There was also a problem in his medical care as much of the expedition equipment had been lost in a Dakota crash en route to Nepal. His death and that of some others brought home the cruel lesson of need for acclimatisation and discipline in the pursuit of Himalayan mountaineering.

Jayal was the founder principal of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute at Darjeeling, with Tenzing Norgay of Everest fame as the Chief Instructor. Both of them were invited by the Swiss Government to Switzerland where they spent three months seeing new things and having new experiences. Maj Jayal became the only non-Swiss to win the coveted Swiss Guide's Diploma and Badge. Jayal led the 1955 Kamet expedition as the Director HMI. Jayal organised an expedition to Nanda Devi in 1957. Bad weather thwarted the expedition but Jayal, never one to give up, went next to the Karakoram where he conquered Saken (24,130 ft) and Sakang (24,150 ft), the third highest peak in the Karakoram range.

In 1948, Nandu Jayal went to Switzerland and acquired a Ski Teacher's Certificate, a very respectable achievement. He was appointed Chief Instructor at the Winter Warfare School, later known as the High Altitude and Winter Warfare School. Under the leadership of the Engineer-in-Chief, Maj. Gen. Harold 'Bill' Williams, himself an eager climber, Nandu Jayal organised the first Sappers expedition to Bandarpunch successfully in 1950. As a young Captain in 1950–51, he carried out a strategic reconnaissance of the Garhwal Himalayas and was later the Indian Army liaison officer for the French Expedition to Nanda Devi in 1951. He organised and led two expeditions to Kamet; the first in 1952 when the summit team was forced back by a blizzard from just 600 metres short of the mountain and later in 1955 when he summitted - at that point of time, it was the highest that an Indian had climbed.

He left the school in December 1944 and was immediately selected in the Army as he was given high rating by the selection committee board due to his outstanding interest in training subordinates . It was a remarkable transformation of Doon's most delinquent boy who had become a "gentle, perfect knight".

Nandu Jayal and his cousin Nalni Dhar joined Doon school in 1935. His father Pandit Chakra Dhar Jayal, was Diwan of the hill state of Tehri Garhwal. He stayed in the school for nine years, where he also became head of his House and captain of school boxing. In 1940 R. L. Holdsworth joined the Doon school as headmaster and became Nandu's housemaster. Nandu was fascinated with Holdsworth's interests in mountaineering and his mountaineering career started while he was a student at The Doon School, where his teachers encouraged his interest in climbing as a way to tame his somewhat unruly nature. He accompanied Holdsworth in many expeditions.

Narendra Dhar Jayal (Nandu Jayal) (25 June 1927 – 28 April 1958) was an Indian mountaineer and an officer of the Bengal Sappers and the Indian Army Corps of Engineers. He is credited with pioneering and patronizing early post-Independence mountaineering in India, and was the founder principal of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. He encouraged the youth of India to take up mountaineering, and has been called the "Marco Polo of Indian Mountaineering".