Imagine not taking a single day off for ten years in succession! Be it shivering cold, rain, excessive heat, illness, injury, or epidemic of any kind, Rajan Dinda, a young lad from WB reaches the distribution centre at Super Mart – 1 at 4:30 am, loads 300 copies of newspapers on his bicycle and sets off to deliver them, cycling several kilometers, covering 200 flats, blocks and houses in the C block, Executive Villas, the Excelsior school and the Peach Tree complex. Covering this route takes him about 4 hours and at the end of which he’s exhausted and ready to collapse.
Rajan then prepares himself for his second phase of the day by hopping across to the market, fetching vegetables, getting back home, cooking, bathing, having breakfast, bundling off something for lunch, and then pedaling about 10 kilometers to reach his usual place of work – a shoe shop in the Sohna Road area where he works as a helper. By the time he calls it a day, it is way past 11 pm – that is, 18 hours of toil in and 30 kilometers of cycling. He, however, is allowed one weekly off from the shoe shop which he chooses to forego to earn some overtime.
Single, with not many familial responsibilities, Ranjan says he’s leading a tough life as he does not get to meet his parents for years. His dad, seriously injured in the leg, is engaged in petty farming activities and raises fish in a pond within his farm compound. They live in a mud-and-brick house and have to brave severe difficulties during rains and floods. “The only saving grace,” he says, “Is the availability of ample water at a depth of barely a hundred feet, allowing us to draw as much water as we want”
Ranjan could afford to study 10 at the Panchet Garh Govt. High School in WB. His younger brother works as an assistant at a training institute. Ranjan can understand, read, and write English. Asked as to what he expects in the future, he says “I am leading a tough life – nobody feels pain for me in case I fall ill or have any other difficulty. Even in fever, I have to go to deliver papers as no one is aware of the route, nor do they know what paper to deliver where. This work cannot be entrusted to the others – Come what may, I, and only I have to do it. People call my distributor immediately if they do not see a newspaper at their doorstep at the usual time of delivery. My distributor does not take any excuses but is quick in taking his pound of flesh off me.
Ranjan does not earn a single penny for delivering newspapers – as a barter, his distributor has given him a shack to live in without any charge. However, he is barely able to make the two ends meet and send some money home out of the 17K that he makes at the shoe shop.
