Mukandpur Chaudhria
(Kathua), April 15
In this village children have been dying of snake bites and women losing lives owing to matured pregnancies in the past 50 years, as the natives are still without a bridge to reach a doctor on the other side of a rivulet.
Mukandpur Chaudhria, along with 29 other such Indo-Pak border villages, is a part of a 10 sq km island between Ujh river and its rivulet known as Bhag Nullah, which has
a population of about 20,000 and gets cut from rest of the country for several days, mainly during the
monsoon or untimely flood-like situation throughout the year.
A foundation stone with a few concrete pillars for the proposed bridge, as promised by the district administration several years back, stands firm near the nullah.
But with losing out on patience after a marriage procession failed to cross the rivulet to reach this village, the villagers gathered on the night of April 8 and began an indefinite fast to demand the same.
“We enabled the bridegroom alone to cross the neck-deep high current waters with the help of ropes in the midnight hours as the muhurat for the wed-lock was nearing,” said Parshotam Lal, a retired headmaster in the village.
The women folk also have their tales to tell as they remembered Aasha, a pregnant woman who lost her life while waiting for the rivulet’s level to go down so that she could be taken to the primary health centre in a nearby town. “She died in pain on the banks of this nullah two years back,” said a woman with tears in her eyes.
A 10-year-old boy died of snake bite as their parents failed to take him across the rivulet one and half years back. “'As many as 52 children have so far died in the past 50 years as we are unable to cross the nullah when it is swollen,” said an old man.
Then there have been routine instances, like a young girl student of class X braving the waist-deep waters to reach the examination centre, a school bus carrying tiny tots waiting throughout the night on the other side for the waters to come down next morning.
“I remembered God with pens and a notebook in my hands and made sure to move every step firmly in the nullah and was able to reach the examination centre where everybody was looking at my wet clothes,” said Aarti.
Eleven houses were washed away by the swollen rivulet in 1996 and the affected families were then given a compensation of mere Rs 5,000 each to re-construct their homes.
The villagers now have a People’s Action Committee, led by their I.D. Khajuria, who also sat on the fast. He was then joined by 12 fellow villagers the next day. After four days the Jammu and Kashmir’s PWD (R and B) minister Gurchain Singh Charak and local MLA Girdhari Lal reached the spot and announced Rs 1.5 crore for the construction of the bridge within one month.
“If nothing happens after one month we will again launch our agitation,” Khajuria said. He, however, expressed hope that the government would soon sanction the construction work.
Fifteen of these 31 inundated villages are in Jammu and Kashmir and 16 are in adjacent Gurdaspur border district of Punjab.
