Villagers still using road made by them 4 yrs ago

Gadchiroli: Despite the crores invested in the Maoist-affected Gadchiroli district through budget allocations or schemes, the reality is that even today, there exits a ‘tola’ or hamlet where villagers have been using a road built by them around four years ago by contributing Rs400 per head.
The 150-200 residents of Ravanwadi tola of north Gadchiroli still recall the efforts they put in to construct the one-and-half kilometre stretch. It took around a year to prepare the makeshift road with loose earth material. That was the first time that the villagers experienced a surface called road which connected their tola to Koregaon-Kesari from where they could go to Wadsa or Kurkheda for their medical needs or to schools, markets or to get any other essentials.
The villagers claimed the idea of having a road had initially faced stiff resistance from the forest department as they admitted to having encroached on the land which comes under their department. Later, the department approved a four-metre wide road after the village got power supply and some of the residents were allocated ownership ‘pattas’.
Former Zilla Prishad chief Gurdeo Netam said the road was constructed following the decision and efforts of the villagers coming together on a common platform called ‘Van surakshan samiti’ or a committee to protect forests. “The decision was taken to construct the road from the ‘Patlin talao’ to the ‘tola’. The loose earth was collected from the adjoining places for the construction of the road,’ he said.
“The framework of the road was in place but the surface was not flat. Desilting and digging of the adjoining ‘Temli talao’ was under way. We requested the contractor to dump the muck from the lake on the road. We later managed to flatten the material with the help of a tractor which was lent to us by the up-sarpanch (deputy head of the village) Bhagwan Gaikwad,” he said.
Netam and other villagers also shared their harrowing experience during the monsoon which in again a few days away. “Our bikes and cycles used to get stuck. Only a tractor could help us to move on the stretch,” he said.
Netam said a year ago, villagers had raised the issue of re-surfacing their road with pebbles and some cementing material before the zilla parishad through their gram sabha but nobody paid heed.
Contradicting the villagers’ claim, Zilla Parishad CEO Vijay Rathod said that the stretch between Ravanwadi tola and Koregaon Kesari resurfaced with earth last year through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme. “We will now take up the road between Tola and Koregaon-Kesari for layering the surface with murum,’ he said.
The villagers of the Ravanwadi tola also had a problem with the unfinished road between their hamlet and the main Ravanwadi village which is also around two kilometres away. “Only one kilometre of makeshift road with loose earth material has been made so far. The villagers from tola frequently visit Ravanwadi to buy their rations or to meet their friends and relatives but there is no road for almost a kilometre,” he said.
ZP CEO Rathod also assured that the resurfacing of the road from Tola to Ravanwadi too would be taken up this year. “We had earlier done some earth work on this stretch too but now, we will resurface it with ‘murum’,” he said.
Congress’s woman taluka president Aarti Lahiri and lawyer-cum-RTI Activist Anjira Vaidya said the local civic bodies should take up the works of the roads of Ravanwadi tola on a serious note as the problem has been existing since several years.