The Bhutanese Leading the way.
Dagpa chiwog under Gealing gewog in Chukha Dzongkhag has remained cut off from the country for more than two months with the massive slide on the connecting farm road yet to be cleared.
The chiwog is reportedly facing a shortage of essentials like rice, grocery items and vegetables with most shops in the Chiwog empty.
The people of the Chiwog lost their road connectivity in July with massive landslide in various places measuring 200 to 300 meters. Today they have to walk two hours from the road head Rockovill to Sanu Zero taking another way.
According to Nidup Dorji, a former Tshogpa, though they have road connectivity from Ganglakha to Chongaykha School, it has made life inconvenient.
“The roadblocks have hampered us in many ways, we could not keep in touch with the gewog and Dzongkhag people whereby development works are getting piled up and everything is pending. “We are suffering when transporting goods,” Nidup Dorji said.
Road clearance has started but it is not completed.
“We are going through tough time even when we have a PWD machine from Dungna with a fuel provided by government. We have to manually carry fuel to refill the machine, whereby each person has to carry around 20 liters,” he said.
Gyeltshen, a former Magmi, said that roadblocks are a yearly issue but they never have faced such a massive roadblock like this year. “I don’t think we will have a road access for the next 7 to 8 months,” he said adding they did not approach government to clear the road. But a meeting was held within the community to put a letter to the gewog office.
Gyeltshen said that they had to hire people to transport goods and for a high charge, as much as Nu 500 to reach their goods from the starting point of the block until Sanu Zero.
Likewise Kinley Dorji from Om Chu village also said that transporting is the main challenge they face during such situation. “We have two schools whereby everything, like vegetables and all eatable things need to be brought from town. Today we do all this manually, hiring people and some volunteers. Most terrifying thing today is when people fall sick and need immediate health care,” he said. The chiwog did request for chopper services for two who were in need of immediate medical attention.
