Villagers of village Dumak started strike in the district headquarters demanding for road.
Chamoli: The villagers of Dumak, a remote village of the district, took out a procession from Gopinath temple to the collectorate under the banner of ‘Vikas Sangharsh Samiti Dumak District Chamoli’ in the district headquarters Gopeshwar on Tuesday demanding road for their village.
The villagers gave a memorandum to District Officer Sandeep Tiwari in the collector premises and after that sat on strike. They were sitting on a continuous strike since August demanding road to their own village, but the administration turn deaf ears to them, therefore, they were forced to come to the district headquarters, the villagers said.
The agitator villagers send a memorandum to the Prime Minister through district magistrate and alleged that due to the arbitrariness of the officials, their village is still deprived of basic facilities like road.
The villagers said that there has 32km road from village Syoon to Dumak was approved in 2007-08 and the Ministry of Environment approved it in 2010 and in the year PMGSY gave the contract to Sanjay Construction Company and the company stopped work after constructing only 9 km of road. And the rate of the remaining 23 km road was revised and the contract was given to Star Construction Company in 2015, but this company also stopped work in 2017, after cutting only 8 km long road, then by changing the element of the road, PMGSY reduced the distance by 3.53 km in 2019 but the work did not start, although, the villagers did not express any objection.
In the year 2021-22, once again its element was changed, according to which now the road was to go directly to Kalgoth leaving Dumak village, due to this the villagers of Dumak were very angry to see their village being deprived of the road and they started the dispute.
In this sequence, the villagers say that now the agitation will be ended only when the road construction work starts, if the road construction process does not start soon then the agitation will be intensified. Ankit Bhandari and Anirudh Sanwal sat on the hunger strike. And with them sat the president of Vikas Sangharsh Samiti Rajendra Singh, Prem Singh and other villagers.