Locked-down with blood on the tracks
The 16 labourers – 8 of them Gond Adivasis – run over by a goods train on May 8 near Aurangabad district in Maharashtra were all in their 20s and 30s, and from Umaria and Shahdol districts of Madhya Pradesh
T
Mumbai, Maharashtra
|FRI, JAN 25, 2019
Train stories from rural India
The railways are a lifeline for many in rural India – trains carry labourers to their workplaces, they are a source of jobs, and the tracks have been sites of anti-colonial resistance. But the journeys can be exhausting and risky, and endured by travellers just to make ends meet. Here is a collection of PARI's train stories
Author
‘Maybe someday they will appreciate my work’
On the train from Beldanga to Kolkata, amid vendors of China-made trinkets, Sanjay Biswas tries to sell his hand-crafted wooden items, hoping passengers won't bargain too much and will allow him a small profit
March 11, 2019 | Smita Khator
Trying hard to dodge this bullet
Rameshbhai Patel of Gujarat’s Kheda district might soon have to give up some of his land for the Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train. He and many others are strongly opposed to the project
March 7, 2019 | Ratna
Slow train, hard work, low wages, long days
Many women domestic workers travel every day from faraway stations on the fringes of the Sundarbans to south Kolkata. The crush of the long train journey adds to the demands of their ceaseless workdays
December 28, 2018 | Urvashi Sarkar
Travelling on the Firewood Express
Left with few livelihood options, Adivasis and Dalits from villages on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh take the train to various towns to sell firewood and earn a few hundred rupees after a hard day
October 9, 2018 | Akshay Gupta
Three labourers in a train
Conversations from the packed Raipur-Dhamtari train, which carries daily wage workers along the 66-kilometre route. But the state has recently shortened the track, cutting off this narrow gauge lifeline for many
September 12, 2018 | Purusottam Thakur
Collecting 6,000 leaves a day for a living
Tulshi Bhagat of Murbichapada in Thane works 32 hours 15 times a month to sell leaves, besides doing farm work and house work – and hopes that educating her children will lift them out of this hard labour
May 3, 2018 | Jyoti Shinoli
‘Captain Elder Brother’ and the whirlwind army
At 94, a forgotten hero of India’s struggle for freedom returns to the scene of his most daring exploit in the anti-British Raj uprising that saw a parallel government established in Satara, Maharashtra, in 1943
October 30, 2016 | P. Sainath
There's a slow, slow train coming...
and if you’re on top of it, keep your head down
April 13, 2016 | Ritayan Mukherjee
The mobile gatekeeper
Meet Kanhaiyalal, a mobile gatekeeper, who opens and shuts 16 railway gates over a 68-kilometre journey
February 5, 2015 | P. Sainath
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