They Had To Wade Through Knee-High Toxic Sludge EVERY Day, But One Teen Did Something Simple To Change Everything.

Can you imagine wading through polluted and fetid water every morning on your way to school? If every amenity you needed to live a normal life lay across that polluted river, life would be pretty tough indeed.

Until last month, the people of Sathe Nagar had to brave these conditions day in and day out to attend school or go to the market. The villagers had grown to accept their daily strife.

But a 17-yr-old student named Eshan Balbale changed everything with passion, effort, and engineering. Over the course of eight hard days, the teen hero built the town’s people a bamboo bridge to carry them over the toxic sludge.

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 Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan 

The 100 foot long, 4-foot wide bridge connects the entire village of Sathe Nagar to the outside world. Without it, children and adults alike were at risk for water-borne skin infections, malaria, dengue fever and other potentially deadly diseases.

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Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan 

The putrid waters of the Nullah affected every aspect of life in Sathe Nagar. During his interactions with the locals, Eshan realized that parents were reluctant to send their children to school because of the pollution, which would only perpetuate the cycle of poverty so rampant in rural India.

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Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan 

“I plan to visit the site at least once a month. If the bridge is used responsibly, it should easily last for a couple of years. In the meantime, I will repair the bridge as and when the need arises,” he promised.

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 Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan 

Eshan plans to maintain the bridge he built, but he has other projects in mind as well. His newly founded NGO, Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan, focuses on getting the youth of India involved in humanitarian work and are planning to build a latrine area within the village to help promote sanitary conditions for everyone there.

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Nirbhay Yuva Pratishthan 

“The residents say that the BMC is reluctant to construct toilets, since there are illegal residents. But they are humans and deserve basic sanitation facilities like the rest of us,” he says.

When regular people stand up to injustice and hardship, they change the world. Who knows how far Eshan’s actions will go, but every child that gets an education and every family that has food for the night will make lasting change ever more likely.

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