Notes from my travels

Travelling through North Bihar at present.

April 7th. Narkatiaganj. Champaran. The town reeks of the fumes given off by the nearby sugar factory. Owned by the Birlas, I am told. Also, the effluents from said factory run untreated into the local rivulet and have turned it into a stinking drain, but that’s another matter. The lodge I’m staying at provides electricity from six in the evening till midnight. Generator power. The regular kind is hardly supplied for 120 minutes a day, and when you discover that bulbs glow dimly and fans make strange noises but refuse to spin, you know that the government ‘line’ is functioning.

Bhikna Thodi. 25 kilometres from Narkatiaganj. One of the villages that are part of the Valmiki Tiger project. Four decades ago, a railway line ran through the village to Nepal across the river bed. Today there’s no railway line, but the signboard of the defunct railway cabin appears to have been recently painted. The eco task force in the village, or ‘ecology committee’ exists, but is functionless and directionless. There was a forest fire a couple of days ago, and the villagers worked hard to put it out. End of story. It was also mentioned that there’s no source of drinking water in the village, and that a major achievement of the panchayat is to ensure that a couple of tankers arrive in the village every two days, carrying potable water from Narkatiaganj. The only source of drinking water is a stream that lies across the riverbed in neighbouring Nepal. The Buddha is said to have spent some days at a well here, which is submerged somewhere in the river bed at present, say the locals.

Rampurva, Gaunaha Block. Site of a fallen Ashokan Pillar. Remote. Picturesque in its own way. Locals say that Bhim used these pillars to play gilli danda!

Bhitiharwa. Site of one of the Ashrams where the Mahatma stayed. Visited the family of the man who invited Gandhi to Champaran to start his famous Indigo movement. The road from the railway station to the Ashram was to have been built six years ago. At least that is what the impressive foundation stone, laid by ( the then)Chief Minister Rabri Devi and Railway minister Laloo Prasad says.