Real life story of a Rotary Volunteer who ventured against threats to his life to argue and convince aggressive mobs trapped by misinformation and fanaticism propagated by vested interests, political clouts and self styled medicos, that Oral Polio V...
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Naipura Industrial Area was a busy part of the village township. There were about one hundred small industrial units, mostly one-man shows engaged in metal working, metal printing, lathe working, wood turning, automobile parts reconditioning, electroplating, plastic sheet making, plastic moulding, and so on. There were some textile dying and printing units as well. Two units of used-saree repairing and re-dying units engaged the largest number of men and women. Altogether the industrial area provided jobs to some three hundred people including boys and girls. While the single-man units worked round the year others were highly seasonal as the workers doubled as agricultural labourers during the planting and harvesting seasons, when the demand for labour was at the peak and more remunerative. The villages around Naipura produced wheat, sugarcane, cabbage and cauliflower besides some quantity of ground nut and vegetables.
The industrial area resembled the ghettos of the olden days. Brick-paved lanes criss-crossed in a disorderly fashion, now winding and now straight, through which men carried heavy loads on head, as no vehicle – not even an auto rikshaw or cycle rikshaw – would enter because of the narrowness and sharp corners. More over the lanes were also used as stock yards for metal scrap and rubbish. Where the streets were wider there were tea-shops and kabab houses or other food joints which got busy during lunch times and evenings. There were a few grocery shops, a couple of green grocers, a milk depot and a sweet-meat shop. Many of the so-called factories or workshops had residential extensions or vice versa, which made the gullies, lanes, lively during the day and the night.
The kind of industrial activity also generated quantities of effluvia, which included colour washes and waste oils and other chemical discharges which were directed to the often dirt-filled and already overflowing open drains. In one of the winding streets there stood an old structure used by the people of the industrial area as well as the residents of the wide waste lands behind as a place of worship, a mosque.
The open land behind the industrial area was marked with a number of single storied – single roomed brick and mortar structures - and hutments thatched with palm leaves or sheets made of asbestos, tar and paper or corrugated iron sheets. Some were new and some dilapidated. Two or three houses had brick-jelly terraces. The space between the dwellings and the adjoining open yards were the dumping grounds for all kinds of rubbish from the workshops and residences and contributed to the pollution of the surrounding air with enough dust and decay.
The mosque was a typical building with a paved courtyard, a two meter wide veranda to its west and a four meter-wide prayer hall further west. The court yard was used for the mid-day congregations, except on Fridays, during winter for the heat of the sun, while the main prayer hall was used at all other times.
In the eastern periphery of the courtyard there were some ten stools made of bricks, nicely plastered with cement mortar. Beyond them was a long water tank which gave water, to the devotees who sat for ablution (washing their hands, face and feet before prayers), through the plastic taps of various colours, red, yellow and blue fixed one each before the brick-stools. Between the stools and the water tank, just below the taps there was a drain which received the waste water. Near the water tank stood a cupboard with pigeon holes for keeping the foot wear. The wall of the water tank near the entrance had a few taps which gave water for washing the feet before entering the mosque.
