Belagavi: On a day when workers across the world stayed off work to mark International Labour Day, more than 200 women from the tiny Sulaga village, on Belagavi’s outskirts slogged it out in the searing temperature digging up silt from the dried up Markendeya river bed under National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA).
A day off for these poor women virtually disrupts their normal lives. With husbands unemployed, the women have no choice but to work every day for a daily wage to run their families.
Owing to a persistent dry spell, Markendeya river has dried up at Sulaga. To revive the source that supplies water to several villages on Belagavi’s outskirts, the government decided to get its silt removed under NREGA.
“We took up work of clearing silt from the river when it was proposed at the Gram Panchayat. More than 200 women joined hands and started work,” says Kavita Sarnad, a worker, showing how skin on her palms has peeled off while digging the ground.
The women labourers were happy to be joined by Laxmi Hebbalkar, president of the State Congress Women's Cell. “I resolved to work on May 1 with these women seeing their sheer will power to dig up the entire stretch of the river bed. No men are assisting them ever since they started work,'” she says.
