“Rukna nahi hai”: How two climbers who stumbled into the sport are now flying India’s flag in Japan

From modest beginnings and family skepticisms to competing on a continental stage, Joga Purty and Deepu Mallesh train under the Tata Sports Academy network in Jamshedpur, part of a broader push to bolster India’s climbing program as the sport eyes Olympic potential. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

“Nobody in my family knows anything about sports. My parents are from the village side. They don’t know what Asian Games or Olympics are. They just know that there’s a competition and I’m going for it.”

These are the words of Joga Purty, one of the two athletes representing India in sport climbing (speed) at the ongoing Asian Games 2026 in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. The other climber is Deepu Mallesh.

Sport climbing is often considered a niche sport in India, but the discipline has existed in the country since the 90’s. India has had representation in this discipline since the sport debuted at the Asiad in the 2018 edition.

The first nationals for sport climbing in India were held in 1995. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

According to Keerthi Pias, the secretary of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation — the governing body for sport climbing in the country — 1991 was the first time an Indian team travelled abroad for a competition, when a four-member Indian contingent took part in the World Cup in Japan. Four years later, the first nationals were held.

Different events in Sport Climbing explained, through the words of Pias

Speed: It is more like 100m sprint. You are running up fast, so you need to have power. There’s no skill involved.

Lead: It is more about endurance. You have um a route um, averaging around 40 moves, so one has to connect those moves and keep climbing up. The person who goes to the highest point is the winner.

Boulder: This is more like a quiz, it’s problem solving. We call them boulder problems. The person who solves the problem in the minimum attempts wins.

“Sport climbing as a competitive sport is an offshoot of mountaineering. People don’t know a lot about it in India because of education. If you go to a layman and tell them that you are a climber, he would ask, ‘Have you climbed the Himalayas?’ But Himalaya is not a peak, Everest is. He means Everest, but he’s not able to say that. The education about mountaineering itself is so little, but in Europe, the education about mountaineering is quite high because there are fewer peaks which are also accessible easily. It’s part of their culture as they grow up,” Pias tells Sportstar.

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Climbers by chance

Deepu and Joga came across the sport by accident. As a child, Deepu was a jack of many sports - football, cricket, badminton, athletics. Studies didn’t interest him. He had even asked his parents — his father works as a chef, mother as a supervisor at a local college — to sign him up for cricket coaching, but the expenses were too steep for his folks.

When the family shifted to a new locality in Bengaluru, Deepu -- now a teenager -- found his coach in his father’s colleague’s son, Shiva.

India has been taking part in sport climbing at the Asian Games since its debut in the 2018 edition. Back then, the contingent was just three people. It increased to seven in China, but now, only two athletes -- Deepu and Joga -- will be representing the country. Across the two editions, India hasn’t been able to medal in the discipline. | Photo Credit: AFP

“My coach was a climber before and asked me one day if I wanted to join him. I didn’t know anything about climbing but I tagged along. I then slowly began going with him for outdoor competitions. He’s the one who has always pushed me to do my best till now,” Deepu, now 28, recalls.

His parents had no qualms as long as he was studying and scoring well in his exams. Naturally, sports took a backseat the year Deepu sat for his Class 10 Boards. The strategy then changed to balance as he studied further.

“It occurred to me that if I didn’t study properly, my parents won’t let me go climbing. So I studied well and tried my best to get good marks when studying for me undergraduate degree. I also chose a college where the classes would finish by 12pm so that I could practise in the evenings,” Deepu, who has M. Com and MTTM (Master of Tourism and Travel Management), adds.

He began competing internationally back in 2019, the same year Joga stumbled upon climbing during a stroll. Hailing from Jharkhand’s Jamshedpur, she had never seen the inside of the JRD Tata Sports Complex, just a stone’s throw away from her home. So one day, she went along with her friends and brothers.

“There was a wall, not one of any international standard, but a simple one,” Joga recalls. She assumed that the wall was there for mountaineering practice because of Bachendri Pal, a former Director of Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (TSAF) who was the first Indian woman to scale Everest.

“It was a 15-metre-high wall with a boulder too and I felt like giving it a try. There was a coach there who saw me and said I did well. He told my brothers to bring me back the next day,” Joga continues.

“A few months later, they (TSAF) admitted me to their academy. And when COVID arrived, I started living at the hostel within the complex. Everything was taken care of,” she says.

In the beginning, typical societal challenges came in the way of Joga’s sporting ambitions, enough to push her parents into discouraging her from climbing altogether. Phrases like “She’s a girl, don’t let her go out”, were also thrown around. But her brothers stood by her.

She slowly began doing well at the national level. When the medals began streaming in, her parents’ objected too eventually melted away.

Tata Academy handling her expenses lifted a huge burden off a financially struggling home unit where her parents and elder brother all worked. Her mother worked at a house, father ran a small store from their residence while her brother was employed elsewhere.

“I’m also just starting out. It’s only been a few months that I’ve been a contracted athlete. My family doesn’t ask me for money,” the 19-year-old says.

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Jamshedpur, a blooming climbing hub

The contract she’s talking about is the one TSAF provides after a climber turns 18 at their academy. Prior to that age, they go by cadets who get a monthly stipend of around Rs. 2000 which has now increased to Rs. 10,000 per month.

“It’s not the contract that we talk about for someone like a Virat Kohli. It is not a contract where we say ‘Hey, just come and play for me’,” Mukul Choudhari, CEO of Tata Sports, explains,

“We want these climber to be serious about what they’re doing and stay on with us. We know that we have the best environment, we have the best infrastructure, and coaches to help them. It is more of an understanding where they stick with us longer.”

The TSAF academy was formally founded in 2020 before the residential programme started in 2021. Even before Joga was scouted, names like Anisha Verma and Aman Verma were already training there. Both represented India at the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games, making it till the Round of 16 of their respective speed events.

Even at the national level, Jamshedpur has gradually emerged as one of the newer spots for competitive climbing.

“For 18 years, South Zone had been dominating the nationals, with Karnataka being the major contributor. After that, Tata has been doing well, thanks to coach Bibhas Roy, who was the coach of their Academy. We moved him up to be the coach of the Indian team. We can say Jharkhand has been winning the medal for the last four or five years, I think. So the powerhouses are Bangalore, Jamshedpur, and Pune,” Pias says about climbing hotbeds in the country.

Recently, Deepu shifted to Jamshedpur after he signed with a seven-month contract with TSAF runs till next March. “They have promised for at least two international competitions and 30 days of international exposure. They are providing us with funds and nutrition. I had nothing back then, so I thought at least something is better than nothing.”

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The gaps

One of the exposure trips involved a visit to Thailand in the lead up to the Asian Games. Accompanying them was South Korean coach Sunkyo Jin, who’s the Technical Director at the TSAF Climbing Academy.

Jin first witnessed Indian sport climbing back in 2024 when TSAF was hosting the Asian Youth Championships in Jamshedpur.

“I could see talent, but there was no systemic training programme (in India). Even though Indians have the physical power and technique, we needed a more long-term plan and more experience. If they train hard in a limited area, a limited route, they can only get to a certain point,” the Korean, a pioneer of the sport back home, suggests.

South Korean coach Sunkyo Jin, the Technical Director at the TSAF Climbing Academy, was among the first group of people to experience climbing back home in 1997. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Jin’s commitment to TSAF was serious. Soon after he signed on in October last year, he bought a house in Jamshedpur so as to be involved in the workings and decision-making through and through. He has been pushing for more technical coaches, better infrastructure and more international exposure trips among much more.

“I think we need healthy competition inside of India first. It’s the same in Japan, Korea and in Europe. Their internal competition is very tough. That way, we can find the best climbers who will compete at the international level. But we just keep all the strong climbers over here [at TSAF]. I think that is not healthy. We need to have more exchange programs with students from other cities. Only then can we have better quality of the competition at the national level,” he adds.

On the other hand, Pias feels the issue with Indian climbing lies somewhere else.

“Unfortunately, in India, we look at infrastructure as the main drawback every time, but it isn’t like that. Even when we had very little infrastructure, we were doing extremely well. It is the human resource that is more important. The more we value the coaches, the route setters, and the technical team, the more we will grow,” the coach-turned-administrator points out.

“Secondly, after it has become an Olympic sport [debut in 2020], everybody wants a piece of the pie. Now the National Sports Governance Act has come. They want a dedicated federation for the sport. The IMF is working towards it. By the end of the year, we should be having a separate wing for sport climbing,” he adds.

Funding is another area which needs to be addressed and after the sport was included in the TOPS scheme by the Sports Authority of India — as per an order dated May 18 of this year — Pias feels the money problem will slowly solve itself, at least for the top athletes.

Deepu is also someone who’s had to deal with fending for himself for the longest time. “Between 2022 and 2025, I was getting by through crowdfunding and people in the community supporting me. Once I came into the national team, I was supported there.”

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Tempering expectations in Aichi-Nagoya

Earlier this year in Meishan, China, a host of Indian climbers participated at the World Climbing Asia Championship. From that crop, only two -- by virtue of their performances -- were selected by the Union Sports Ministry for the Asian Games in Nagoya: Deepu and Joga. While Deepu finished 23rd with a best timing of 5.39s, Joga made it till the Round of 16, where she bowed out with a 7.37s timing.

However, the speed event in climbing is quite fickle. Timings alone can’t guarantee you a medal. A slip here and a fall there can get you knocked out, as Joga explains.

For Jin, the exposure trip to Thailand was for the Indian climbers, set to make their Asiad debut, to get a glimpse of what the competition would be like. Indonesia, Japan, and China are the most successful nations in this discipline at the Games.

“They saw the reality. Timing wise, our athletes are at 5.2s in men’s and 7.3s in women’s. But at the world level, it’s 4.7s for men and 6.4s for women. They also saw some of the American athletes who were there. One month before the tournament, we cannot change their training methods, but they can have a better strategy.

“I think one of them can get to the semifinals. The first round is qualification, where the top 16 advance with their best score. But after that, it’s knockouts. If they make a small mistake, they lose the game,” Jin says.

Pias, meanwhile, says, “Medal is not our target. We always teach them to be better than yesterday.”

That said, he believes getting to the 2036 Olympic podium might be a realistic target and that the next Asian Games, too, could yield a few medals.

Meanwhile, Deepu will hope that his name makes the newspapers again so that his parents get happy about what he’s doing with his life and not ask him to get a job. For now, he, Joga, and the whole of Indian sport climbing will draw inspiration from the words on Deepu’s luggage bag tag: Rukna nahi hai (Don’t stop).

Published on Sep 28, 2026

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