NGO to fill potholes en route Guru’s wedding anniversary procession

Ravi Dhaliwal
Tribune News Service
Batala, August 18

Even as preparations are afoot to celebrate the 532nd marriage anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev at the historic Kandh Sahib shrine on September 5, the focus is on NGO Inqalab Sabha, whose members have resolved to cover manholes and fill potholes on the main road on which the procession is to pass.

Last year, Gurnoor Singh, 5, had died after slipping into a manhole. To ensure that such a tragedy does not recur, led by Jagjot Singh Sandhu, an IT postgraduate, Inqalab Sabha volunteers are paying from their own pocket to buy cement bags to fill the potholes. They are also making sure that government hospitals have adequate stocks of medicine to be given to the poor and needy.

“Covering manholes and repairing roads from our own resources is not a problem. What irks us most is the lack of quality healthcare in government hospitals, despite the fact that the industrialised town of Batala is among the 10 big cities of Punjab. “These hospitals are termed as ‘referral entities’ because most of the time patients are sent to hospitals in Amritsar,” said Sandhu, who in 2017 filed an RTI in this regard.

“We simply want to make sure the name of our city is not sullied due to lack of facilities,” said volunteer Paras Nagi. Split into small groups after dusk, the sabha volunteers take out their vehicles and are out on roads looking for manholes and potholes. This has been their routine for the past one month, and will be so till the evening of September 5. Their good work has earned them recognition.

In 2018, Batala SDM Rohit Gupta felicitated their leader Jagjot Singh Sandhu for “launching an effective anti-drug drive.”