Post News Network
Hatadihi, March 30: The life of Kailash Kuanr is a life of struggle. Kailash’s two-room shanty in Salabani village under this block in Keonjhar is covered with polythene and is damaged. This speaks volumes of his poverty and deprivation.
Kailash Is the only bread winner in the 11-member family. He finds it difficult to properly feed his family with the meager daily wage he gets hawking newspapers. As such, most of them have to sometimes go without meals.
The poverty is so grinding that his two sisters have remained unmarried.
There is the added responsibility of taking care of his elderly parents and a widowed sister, which adds to the financial burden. In this scenario, Kailash, who has been hawking newspapers for a living for the past 10 years, is unable to send his children to school.
With a decent income a distant dream, Kailash, who has only 15 gunths of land, is worried about the future of his five-year old daughter and the eight-year old son of his widowed sister.
The only help he gets from the government, which has been implementing several poverty-alleviation programmes, is subsidized kerosene and a few kilos of wheat. He has taken up the matter with officials at the block and panchayat level, pleading with them for government benefits, but no one has ever paid to heed to his pleas.
People of the area have demanded that the government provide benefits to the poor man.
