A group of students from a village in Odisha’s Malkangiri district decided to fix a road on their own to their school.
Students from the Talakata government school of the Korukonda block constructed potholes on the road from their village of Padalput to Majhiguda village in Korukonda block.
Villagers in Padalput use this road to commute to other villages. There was a four-year gap between the sarpanch’s request for a road to facilitate efficient transportation and the construction began.
Under the government’s recent merger policy, there will be no more schools in Padalput. When schools resumed after the lockdown, children from Padalput were forced to walk miles on the damaged stretch between Padalput and Majhiguda.
When the whole village suffered from recurring bad weather, a few youngsters decided to take matters into their own hands.
Being home throughout the lockdown, there was never any danger of having to use the road. Now that there is no school in our village, we usually travel by bus every day. Two of our friends came across an accident on Tuesday. The degrading conditions will only get worse during the monsoons. That’s why we took the initiative to fix the road. So we all came to the meeting and resolved to repair and maintain the road once again, said Naveena Padal, a student of Class 8.
With the students’ gathering, members of a local NGO (Team Sanghathan) and many women from a Self Help Group also helped.
In order to reach the destination, we got a tractor to transport the stones and the women from the local SHG agreed to help without pay. We have also written letters and sent e-mails to officials, but we don’t know which authority is responsible for the building. The NGOs contributed in Rs 2000 towards the initial cost of the tractors and the construction material.
Despite villagers being issued their appeals, the roads remain in shambles.
