For the bachelors of two Bihar villages, the road to wedlock is a rocky one. But they are now working to make it a smoother ride

At 75, Kishun Yadav is the oldest bachelor in Badwan Khurd. He kept waiting for a girl for much of his life and only gave up recently. But he didn’t want the other 150 bachelors in his village—between 25 and 70 years—to go his way so he told them they would have to move heaven and earth if they were to bring home a wife. And that’s what the villagers of Badwan Khurd and its twin village, Badwan Kalan, have been doing since January this year.

The twin villages, 40 km from the district headquarters of Bhabhua and 240 km from Patna, remain cut off from development by the Adhaura Hills, part of the Kaimur hills. They are infamously known as the “villages of bachelors and spinsters” because marriage proposals are hard to come by. But now, after years of waiting for the government to build them a road that will make their village more accessible, the villagers have taken it upon themselves to cut a six km road through the hills. They have already made a workable road on the Adhaura hills for about three-and-a-half km. They now have the arduous task of carving a road downhill.

After a smooth ride till Bhagwanpur police station—under which the twin villages fall—it is another five-km bumpy ride till Jaitpur village. That’s where the road ends and vehicles sputter and stop. After a one km walk to the Adhaura foothills, the journey to Badwan Khurd and Badwan Kalan starts. It’s a steep climb up the rock stairs. The villagers have posted Chandraman Singh Yadav, Mohan Singh Yadav, Rajendra Singh and Shailesh to cheer on wobbly climbers like us. Several missteps and some near-falls later, the sound of chisels and spades striking on hard rock starts ringing in. Two hundred yards later, we see the men and women, over 70 of them, carving their destiny—cutting stones, moving huge boulders and leveling the road.

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