Chamoli: Uttarakhand villagers demanding road for 40 yrs to boycott polls

Chamoli : The villagers of Dumak in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district have decided to boycott the upcoming Lok Sabha polls over the non-construction of a vital road linking the village with the district headquarters for which they have been agitating for four decades.

Whenever elections are round the corner, the villagers renew their poll boycott call in the hope of getting their long-standing demand fulfilled. Construction agencies rush equipment to the village raising their hopes, but those are withdrawn as soon as the elections are over. Dumak hosts one of the remotest polling stations in Chamoli district.

The residents of several villages of the area have formed a joint struggle committee for the construction of the road from Syund to Dumak and Kalgot.

The convenor of the committee and former head of Dumak village, Prem Singh Sanwal, said the people of Dasholi and Pankhanda areas have boycotted elections twice since the 1990s to demand the construction of the road.

The residents of Dumak had even decided to boycott the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he said, adding that on the district administration’s initiative, the road construction department sent machines to the village about a week before the polling day, which led to the withdrawal of the poll boycott call. However, as soon as the polling process was over, the department took back the machines.

It has been five years since but the fate of the road is still uncertain, Sanwal said. The angry villagers had launched a long protest in January.