Sirsa: After bureaucracy and red tapism started to weigh them down, the villagers of Haryana's Sirsa district took matters into their own hands by crowdfunding Rs 1 Crore to build a bridge over the Ghaggar river.
“The villagers have been saying that even their fathers and grandfathers had appealed to the politicians visiting this area for a bridge to be constructed. However, their demands were always ignored. They needed a boat to travel from one village to the other. Many people have also lost their lives while attempting to cross the river,” a villager said.
They wanted a bridge over the river to reach Sirsa town with their farm produce faster and get better access to markets in Punjab. When their plea to politicians and bureaucrats fell on deaf ears, they teamed up to built a 250-foot-long, 14-foot-wide bridge. “For us, a labourer who contributed Rs 500 and a widow who contributed her pension of Rs 1,000 are more important than those who fooled us for more than three decades,” Villager Hardev Singh said.
The idea came to Hardev after he met an engineer supervising the construction of a bridge in Rajasthan. He later came back to his village and discussed it with the villagers, jointly agreeing to build their own bridge.
People of nine villages raised around Rs 1 Crore for the construction of the bridge, which will become a vital link for the people of around 30 villages and will help close to 1.25 lakh people have better connectivity to Sirsa town.
