Ganesh Hansda, SM

Biography

Sepoy Ganesh Hansda was born in 1997 in the tribal village of Kosaphalia in the Singhbhum district of Jharkhand. After three years of NCC training at LBSM College, Jamshedpur, he enlisted in September 2018 at the age of twenty and, on completing his training at Danapur, was inducted into the 16 Bihar Battalion of the Bihar Regiment and posted to Ladakh. During June 2020 the unit was deployed near the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh as part of Operation Snow Leopard, as tensions rose over the Galwan Valley along the route to Daulat Beg Oldie. On the night of 15 June 2020 the commanding officer of the 16 Bihar Battalion, Colonel Santosh Babu, led talks to defuse the standoff, but these turned into a brutal hand-to-hand clash as Chinese troops attacked with iron rods and clubs. In the fighting that raged for several hours along the freezing river, he and nineteen other soldiers laid down their lives for the nation. Twenty-two years old, Sepoy Ganesh Hansda was awarded the Sena Medal on 26 January 2021 for his courage, devotion to duty and supreme sacrifice.