Dashrath Manjhi breaks a mountain

  

  

• Dasarath Manjhi (1934-2007), an illeterate daily wage earner, shot into limelight after he constructed a 360 feet long, 30 feet high and 25 feet wide passage through Gehlour hills with a hammer, chisel and nails working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982. His feat reduced the distance between Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district (Bihar) from 55 km to just 15 km, bringing him international acclaim.
• He resolved to build the road after his wife, Falguni, died of injuries on the way to the hospital in Wazirganj.
• Dashrath Manjhi belonged to Bihar’s Musahar community, nearly 98% of them are landless and not even 1% of them are literate, which makes them the community with the country’s lowest literacy rate. 
• After finishing his epic project he met the brass of the state administration with a request to construct a metalled road through the mountain.
• When Manjhi had met Nitish Kumar at a janata durbar in July 2006 in Patna, Nitish Kumar stood up in reverence to the man with Himalayan resolve and made him sit on the Chief Minister’s chair. 
• The state government had allotted a five-acre plot to Manjhi in Karjani village, which he donated for construction of a hospital. The government had recently announced to name the hospital after Manjhi. Everybody is now waiting for the six-bed Dasrath Manjhi Hospital to open in Dasrath Nagar. An additional public healthcare centre providing OPD services at Gehlaur is all that they have in the name of medical care.
• The mountain man’s only son and daughter in-law are handicapped and the family lives in abject poverty. For his own family, Manjhi could do nothing more than procuring an Indira Awaas Yojna unit.
• Dashrath Manjhi, the septuagenarian ‘mountain man’ ['pahad purush' to locals] of Gehlour died at the AIIMS, New Delhi in 2007 from cancer of gall bladder. When he died at 73, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had reached his village to receive his body and offered a state funeral. 
• In Manjhi’s own words, "What I did is there for everyone to see. When God is with you, nothing can stop you. I will keep working for the development of the villages here so long I am alive. I am neither afraid of any punishment from any government department for my work nor am I interested in any honour from the government".
• "It is a sad story. A state that spends millions of rupees for decoration of ministers' houses failed to fulfil his dream of building a metalled road through the mountain," said Arun Singh, a journalist who first discovered Manjhi in the 1990s. "Manjhi died a frustrated man. His work was neither recognised nor awarded. But people will remember him and his story will inspire many," Arun Singh, who knew Manjhi for over a decade, told.

Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal for his beloved wife Mumtaz, the world's greatest monument of love. Thousands of labourers took more than 20 years to build the Taj Mahal. Dashrath Manjhi' monument of love may not be as beautiful, but is more awe-inspiring than Shah Jahan's feat. 

Read the detailed article

MOUNTAIN MAN DASHRATH MANJHI

If the mind is intensely eager, everything can be accomplished.

Mountains can be crumbled into atoms .. Swami Vivekanda

Eventhough Manjhi was breaking mountain out of his intense love for his wife, he was also making a huge contribution to his fellow villagers who stands benefited of his arduous work. It is so much easy to appreciate but so much difficult to do that too day & night for 22 years. Manjhi's work is second only to the Chinese man Liu Guojiang after he spent 56 years of his life building a 6,000-step mountain staircase for his wife's convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.. In 2001, a group of adventures were exploring the forest, they surprisingly found the elderly couple and the over 6,000 stairs of hand carved ladder.