Villagers plant paddy on muddy road in Madhya Pradesh village to protest delay in road construction

BHOPAL: Frustrated by the dilapidated condition of a village road, residents in Papoundh village under Beohari janpad panchayat in Shahdol district adopted a unique mode of protest by planting paddy saplings on the muddy stretch.

The demonstration aimed to draw attention to their long-pending demand for road construction.The protest comes in the wake of a similar viral video from Sidhi district, where locals took to symbolic gestures to highlight civic neglect. In Papoundh, villagers said they requested authorities for years to repair or construct the road, but their appeals were repeatedly ignored.Another villager claimed that not a single trolley of gravel was laid on the road since Independence.Residents said the poor condition of the road makes daily travel extremely difficult, especially for schoolchildren. They warned that if their demands continue to go unheard, they will intensify their protest and take their message to the ballot box in the upcoming elections.“I was trying to get the gravel road built for quite some time. The construction of gravel roads was stopped by the govt for nearly a year. Now the process of sanctioning such roads has started, but the sanction is done at district level and monsoon has already started,” Papound village panchayat Sarpanch, Vineet Kumar Chaturvedi, told