Trapeze artists, anyone? All shapes and sizes, age and gender no bar. For a demonstration, head 15 kms out of Bhopal to the villages of Dobra Jagir and Sagoni Chor and watch what their residents do to reach the Sagoni Kalan village on the other side of the 20 feet-deep Anjal river: they balance themselves onto a wire that’s slung across, clutch another wire that’s hooked up overhead for support and walk the half-kilometre stretch.And this survival gamehas no dearth of players: girls studying at the middle school at Adampur, milkmen holding on to their pails, men slinging cycles across their shoulders, mothers hugging infants in their arms. Every day, several times a day, for the past 30 years. This wire ‘bridge’ saves the villagers an hourlong trek through a dirt track to the main road that’s three kilometres away. It cuts down the distance to less than a kilometre.Nobody remembers any fatal accidents. Seema, Bhuriya and Mamta, all Class VIII students, navigate the wire every day to reach school. ‘‘We are used to it. And all of us can swim,’’ says Mamta. ‘‘It can be a problem, like when my cousin Ombati fell into the river on the day of her exams. She had to go home and change and she was late for the exam.’’The sarpanch of the panchayat that governs the villages of Dobra Jagir, Sagoni Chor and Sagoni Kalan, Ram Prasad Singh, is spared the tightrope act: he lives in Bhopal. What’s more, he turned down a proposal to build a bridge on grounds of safety! ‘‘Three years ago, Uma Bharti announced Rs 50,000. A foundation stone was also laid,’’ Singh said. The village falls under the Bhopal Assembly constituency, and is represented by the Leader of the Opposition ‘‘When we got a survey done, the cost to build a bridge worked out to Rs 5 lakh. I refused because I didn’t want a makeshift contraption that could collapse and pose a danger to the people.’’In the absence of official intervention, the villagers have experimented. Gulab Singh, a Sagoni Kalan resident, says, ‘‘We built log bridges which got washed away. We even tried a swinging bridge, but a Block Development Officer fell off it, so we settled for this. Though the wire takes time getting adjusted to, we can make our way across even when the river is in spate.’’The villages in Digvijay Singh country have many other headaches: Dobra Jagir has just one government handpump which spits out red coloured water. Sogari Kalan’s primary school has one teacher for five classes, and it rarely see the face of a gram sewak or a health worker. Shiv Kumar Sharma, a Dobra resident, says, ‘‘Our children don’t even get vaccinated on time. The health staff avoids this village.’’ Maybe they haven’t learnt to be trapeze artists yet.
