Skip to main content

Lives and Livelihood of people at Gunj: 2020

Dear Readers! As mentioned in my previous blog, "Life at Gunj", the population of Mccluskiegunj can be broadly classified into two categories. One that have immigrated to Gunj for earning their living by working in institutions like Don Bosco Academy, situated at Mccluskiegunj.

People falling into this category faced a lot of financial crisis as their major source of earning paused. Small proprietors earned no revenue during the lockdown. The sweet shop owners had no customer as the major chunk of customers are students who stay at hostels in Gunj. Even the crows and street dogs lost their weight, since the extra food of the hostel was their source of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Since there were zero corona positive cases here, people used to go out and meet among each other on streets (By maintaining proper social distancing and wearing masks).

The best part of the day since everyone of us who met on the streets used to share about the pandemic situation, about the vaccines and trials performed all over the world. Women grieved upon the increased use of grocery, which eventually led to exceeding monthly budget. Unfortunately we miss this bond affinity towards each other in urban areas. I believe the more the bigger the city the bigger is the affinity gap between each other!

On the other side, I saw a  transition in the lives of people living in the rural part of Gunj. Seasonal migrants chose the option of opening retail shops,  with whatever capital they had. Ones those that left their traditional occupation of farming, gained back their roots. They started agriculture practices (on-farm and non-farm) and earned livelihood through selling these at local market (Bazar).

I have seen women who never used to step out of house for earning livelihood, have chosen to be a fruit vendor, work as a house helper, used their tailoring skills and started making bags out of old rags.

Though their scale of work is small, but I believe with the time to come worth the help of Government schemes and personal capital, they will set an example in society. Cheers to Empowerment! 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My first day at Antwerp, Belgium.

  Before boarding my flight, from Birsa Munda Airport ; I did quite an extensive research upon Antwerp. Historical places, stories behind them, best chocolatiers, best ice-cream parlors and many more. Amsterdam was fun but coming to Antwerp was the main agenda, since I was a part of the summer school course at University of Antwerp. I had one day at hand to explore Antwerp, since my classes were scheduled from the next day. Early morning, I went to the nearest big Mart, picked multigrain -bread, croissant , cherry tomato and hummus dips. I picked a regular cup of coffee went to the Antwerp Station, fetched a map in French and Dutch (Oh Gosh! Maps in English were out of stock). The person standing next to the Ticket vending machine asked me to go the board next to the exit gate, and click a photo of the map printed on the board. I genuinely wanted to hug him, he made my plans execute so easy. Since Antwerp is a small city, finding my way towards Antwerp Zoo was not difficult. Be...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Lockdown Story

 Covid-19 pandemic led to national lockdown and multiple government restrictions for the safety of the public. You would agree to the fact that many of us took this lockdown as an opportunity and learned new skills, and many of us would curse the period since they were forced to do things that they usually don't do. As I mentioned in my previous blog that my roots belong to Bengal. My father visited by Grandfather's place in early March. And when it was time to return back to Mccluskiegunj , to us; national lockdown was imposed all over India. He was stuck there! Weeks passed, we applied for travel passes for both West Bengal and Jharkhand to bring my Dad back to Gunj . None worked! We waited for a month, thinking some restrictions on travel may be reduced by the Government in the weeks to come. On the contrary, instead of reducing the restrictions, imposed lockdown extended for another month. And this process went on until, the unlock phases began.   Meanwhile, we conti...
Post a Comment
Read more