Durga Puja team fosters parched Palghar village

The parched village of Masanpada in Talasari taluka of Palghar—around 140 kms from Mumbai—has as many problems as Goddess Durga has hands. While water scarcity is the biggest of them all, intermittent electricity, intermittent joblessness, poor accessibility, lack of education and poverty adds to its well of woes.
To search for water here, a curious man named Madhu Bhai walks around this village barefoot with a coconut in his palm.The zones in which he feels significant movement in the coconut, are believed to hold hydraulic gifts. In 2017, on one of his walks, he was followed by a group of Bengalis and IITians when his coconut fell in two spots. On digging, the team from Powai found water in one of these spots and built a tubewell there.
While this endeavour of the Powai Bengali Welfare Association (PBWA)—which organises the Times Powai Sarvojanin Durgotsav every year—seems to have helped thirsty Masanpada whose erstwhile tubewell used to completely dry up in the hot months of April and May, the village must now feel nurtured in other ways.
Since two years now, the multiple helping hands of PWBA have brought some respite to Masanpada by adopting it and trying to address various issues under its foster care. To ensure that the meritorious students from each class in the 380-strong panchayat school here do not suffer during the frequent power cuts here, for instance, the association has provided them with solar lamps. Besides, given that the school is far off from the villages and that the kids are sent to collect bamboos which will be used for cooking, PBWA—along with the school teachers—measured the size of each of the students’ feet and procured footwear from Mumbai. The students also received umbrellas, footballs and stationery.
Along with Talasari's Masanpada, PBWA also works in Kelicipada and Alyummal villages in the malnourishmentgrappling Jawahar district where since 2014, it has initiated a breakfast program for schoolchildren in the two villages. “Today, in addition to Masanpada, we have started focusing on the entire Kochai-Borimal group panchayat which comprises seven villages in the region,” says a member of PBWA.