We all know that poverty is a CURSE. It is true when we look into the dark side of life we find people struggling for existence. They are fighting with one another for a small piece of bread, a small piece of place to live, a small piece of sky to breathe, because they are poor.
I do travel a lot due to my job. Once I was in Jharkhand capital, Ranchi. There I was going to a place called Patratu 55 kms away from Ranchi. A nice place amidst hills and hill Terrance. The place is in the Ramgarh district.
There I saw a different picture of poverty and struggle for life. The place is rich in Coal. Lots of coal mines are there. Now the story begins from here. The poor people of Ranchi come up to this hilly side to steal coal and bring them down to Ranchi to sell it.
Oh! A pathetic sight to see. These people use cycle to transport the coal from Patratu to Ranchi. They enter the deep jungles for coal. Some dies of poisonous snake bites or leopard takes them off. Death is a day to day story for them, when they leave Ranchi they don’t even know who will be coming back with them. All they do only for some money, only for some food for their family.
They move inside the jungles and make a tunnel to the main mine. They stay there for 2 days and bring out as many tones of coal they can. Put the coals in jute bags and each person takes as much as 25 bags in cycle. Its really astonishing! One person is taking 250 to 300 kg of coal bags in a cycle wrapped tightly around the cycle. They push the cycle then up and down the hills to Ranchi where they sell out in local market. While carrying the cycle up the hill many sleeps in the lap of death due to heart failure.
This they carry on till death or hereditary as this is the only way except beggary to survive for these poor people of Jharkhand.
No comments:
Post a Comment