Thursday, July 30, 2015

An hour with Kalam that changed Sairang’s fate

Aizawl: From a non-descript village till September, 2005, to a flourishing one, Sairang has undergone a sea change in the past decade. The village owes it to one man, who almost single-handedly scripted their transformation: APJ Abdul Kalam.

The village has been in mourning since the death of the former President. Villagers remembered how Kalam gave them a patient hearing and addressed their grievances during that visit in 2005, which lasted about an hour.

The Missile Man visited Mizoram in September, 2005 and stopped at Sairang after landing at the Lengpui airport nearby for about an hour. The leaders of the village council met him with a memorandum appealing for an end to the mahal system of collecting sands from the Tlawng river near the village.

The villagers had long been denied the right to collect river sand by the state government and the wealthy mahaldars from Aizawl city, working under the state environment and forests department, monopolized extraction of sands from the area around the village.

Repeated appeals made by the villagers for rights to use the resources in and around the village area bore little results until Kalam's visit.

President of the Sairang branch of the Young Mizo Association (YMA), Teresa Rothangpuii, said, "We appealed to Kalam and after a few days of his visit, the state government abolished the mahaldar system and the villagers became the owners of the produces of the Tlawng since then."

She said since then, prosperity arrived in the village and the concrete building that slowly started coming up there were a testimony to that.

"The outside world might think that what Kalam did to us was a small thing, but we the inhabitants of Sairang village know what the former President did helped completely change our lives. We shall remember him forever," she added.