Nepal Infrastructure 
KATHMANDU: May 29, 2022, marks the 69th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt. Everest. On May 29, 1953, Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, then a Nepali citizen, and Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, successfully scaled the world’s highest peak. The government of Nepal has been celebrating May 29 as International Everest Day.
According to the Department of Tourism, more than 12,000 climbers have reached the peak of the 8848.86-meter mountain since 1953. According to the department, 5,300 people have climbed Mt. Everest from 1953 to 2016, and 7,000 more since 2016. For the current season 2022, 262 people have taken permission from the government to climb the highest peak till 2 Baisakh 2079.
Former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, Angchiring Sherpa, said that the number of people climbing Mt. Everest is increasing every year. According to Sherpa, the number of deaths while climbing the peak to 325 since the historical first ascent.
According to the Nepal Tourism Department, Junko Tabei, the first Japanese woman climber, climbed Mt. Everest on May 16, 1975. According to the statistics of the department, from 1975 to 2016, 323 women have climbed. The first Nepali woman is Pasanglamu Sherpa. The highest number of climbers is from America.
There is a legal requirement for foreigners to pay a royalty of USD 11,000 per person to get permission to climb Mt. Everest. In the case of Nepali, each person has to pay a royalty of 75,000 Nepali rupees.
The beginning of climbing Mt. Everest
After the fact that the height of Mount Everest was found to be 8,040 meters in 1855, the British started their efforts to climb it in the same year. However, the first attempt to climb Mt. Everest was made in 1921 by a team led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard Barry of the British Army.
After the British team got permission in 1920, they climbed Mt. Everest for the first time in 1921. Dr. AM Callus made two attempts to climb Mt. Everest during 1921-38. However, he died during his second attempt. In 1950-51, the British Ascent Team and in 1952, the Swiss Ascent Team tried to climb from the Nepali side. However, they could not succeed.
After repeated attempts, the successful ascent was on May 29, 1953, after a gap of 30 years. Over the period of 69 years, many records have been set in the course of climbing Mt. Everest.
New height of Everest
For the first time, Nepal measured the height of Everest using its own resources. 23 December of 2021, a joint team of Nepali and Chinese surveyors team declared that the height of Mt. Everest has edged up by 86 centimeters to 8,848.86 meters. The officially recognized height of Mt. Everest was 8,848 meters since the survey was conducted in 1954.
