Tribal children walk miles, pleading for road
The rain washed away the blacktop’s pretense, revealing the village truth beneath—just mud, just broken promises.
The dust rises in little clouds beneath their bare feet, each step a small prayer carried on the wind. They have walked this path before, these tribal children of Vizianagaram’s agency area—walked it in the searing heat of summer, walked it when the rains turned the earth to slippery mud, walked it when their legs ached and their stomachs grumbled and their small bodies begged for rest.
But today is different. Today, they carry more than just their school bags. In their small hands, they hold pictures of a man they have never met, a leader they only know from television screens and newspaper photographs. Deputy Chief Minister K Pawan Kalyan smiles from the faded prints they grip tightly, unaware that his image is about to become their voice.
Behind them stands their teacher, the man who likely spends his own days traveling this same brutal route to reach them. His heart breaks a little more each morning when he watches them arrive—dust-covered, exhausted, but still determined to learn. Today, he has decided to make the world see.
“Deputy CM sir, please lay a road for us,” the children chant in unison, their young voices carrying through the thin air of the Daraparthi hills. “We want to study.
Twelve kilometers. For a child, that distance is not measured in miles but in hours—hours stolen from sleep, from play, from the simple joy of being young. They rise before the sun, while the forest is still dark and mysterious, and begin their journey. Through paths that are not paths at all, just memories worn into the hillside by generations of feet like theirs.
The road, if it can be called that, tells its own story. Someone once tried to help. Traces of tar and bitumen cling stubbornly to patches of earth, remnants of an attempt to tame this rugged terrain. But the monsoons came, as they always do, and washed away the pretense. Now the blacktop lies in scattered pieces, like promises broken and abandoned. No one remembers how many years ago that was. The hills have longer memories than men.
What remains are trenches carved by rainwater, boulders that seem to grow overnight, and stones sharp enough to cut through the toughest skin. The children navigate these obstacles with the practiced ease of those who have no choice. They have learned which rocks are stable, which puddles hide deep holes, where to step and where to leap.
Their teacher watches them, his own feet scarred from the same journey. He knows that some of these children will not finish school—not because they lack intelligence or ambition, but simply because the distance becomes too much. The body can only endure so much before it surrenders.
The video capturing their protest spreads slowly through phones and social media, each view adding weight to their simple plea. Behind the lens, the hills stand silent witness. Above them, the same sky that watches over cities with smooth roads and school buses looks down on these children, who ask for nothing more than a path that doesn’t punish them for wanting to learn.
Their voices fade into the vastness of the agency area, but somewhere, perhaps, a man with the power to help might hear them. And maybe, just maybe, the next time the monsoons come, they will wash over a road that stays.