JHARKHAND: It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. Jitendra Mahto along with family decided to visit Nandan Pahar in Jharkhand’s Deoghar. As they were about to enter the recreation site, Mahto spotted that a piece of glass pierced through his son’s foot, leaving him profusely bleeding. Shaken by the incident that took place five years ago, Mahto, a fourth-grade employee at the state irrigation department, took a pledge to make the area free broken glasses, plastics and other waste.
Since then, Mahto has been cleaning the area single-handedly every morning on his way to office by picking up glass pieces, chocolate wrappers, thermocoal plates and other things throw away by visitors at the tourists place. Not only this. Using the glass pieces, Mahto has made state-of-the-art dustbins after crushing them into small pieces and mixing cement and sand with them. The government official also encourages visitors to throw garbages into the dustbins.
Seeing his dedication, locals have started calling him the ‘Mountain Man’, the name originally given to Dashrath Manjhi, a labourer in Gehlaur village, near Gaya in Bihar, who carved a path 110-metre- long through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and chisel. “The glass pierced through my son’s foot, crying in pain, he had asked me ‘why did people throw these glasses here and why was the place not clean, papa’”... His words took me by surprise because I didn’t expect such a question from a child. That question forced me to introspect myself as an individual.
I took a pledge then that I would never let anybody undergo the same pain which my son had experienced, and decided to make the place free of garbage, he added. Mahto has also planted hundreds of trees on his way to Nandan Pahar and the sides of railway lines in a radius of around 5 km. “He has been doing a commendable job by making people aware of keeping their surroundings clean. Now, you can hardly find any piece of glass in Nandan Pahar, thanks to Mahto’s dedication,” said Deepak Kumar Lal, a local, who has been visiting the place for the last 10-12 years. Lal said it is Mahto’s affection towards nature that he always keeps a container on his bicycle to water the plants wherever he sees them. Locals have also started supporting him by donating money which is being used in purchasing colours for painting walls with social messages.